Introduction of the President of the FEST Board

FEST is one step away from reaching the 50^th floor. Next year, in 2020, will mark half a century since the decision about the establishing of the festival, which was made on 23 September, 1970, not far from the building of the Kombank Hall, which was at the time called the Trade Union Hall. This monumental building at the former Square of Marx and Engels became the main festival venue, the locus of urban legends, which resonate equally well as the title - FEST. Together with Milutin Čolić, the history of the time also remembers the name of the film director Dušan Makavejev, who was among the first to support the idea that Belgrade should receive an international festival of the festivals. Some people say that it was him who gave this four-letter title to the newly founded event. Today’s FEST, which is projected onto fourteen screens, returns nostalgically to the place from which it was launched, thanks to the positioning of the Main Competition Program and no less important Serbian Film (Serbia and Friends) competition program at the cinema of its birth. So that the past should encounter the future. It is done innocently, under the slogan UNPROTECTED and with the poster which pays tribute to the well known film of its stakeholder. Mister Dušan Makavejev looked and filmed beyond his time. Such were the films he brough to FEST under the label of “confrontation,” such were the films which he sent into the “brave new world” from this location. The contemporary film is losing its battle with TV series. The television is trying to keep up with Netflix. Thus, the festivals, big and small, are becoming the oases in the digital desert. A fatamorgana which pushes and delays their ending credits. 

Ivan Karl

President of the FEST Board