Programme Director Bernd Buder was a guest at the European Film Festival Palić. He reports:
"The European Film Festival Palić took place for the 32nd time this year. It's a special festival for me: I took part in my first ever jury here in 1997. Since then, the festival near Subotica in Vojvodina in the north of Serbia, not far from the border with Hungary, has steadily grown in importance. I am delighted to have been invited back to the jury this year by festival director Ilija Tatić and to be able to award the prize for the best film in the ‘Parallels & Encounters’ section together with North Macedonian producer Tomi Salkovski and British director and screenwriter Peter Webber. This competition, curated by Julia Sinkevych, shows new films from Eastern Europe.
Palić, together with FilmFestival Cottbus and five other festivals, is a member of the European film festival network ‘Moving Images Open Borders’ (MIOB). This year, the short film competition MIOB in Shorts and the Serbian-American co-production WHEN THE PHONE RANG were also screened here. Iva Radivojević's autobiographically inspired essayistic feature film about a teenage girl's double experience of loss - her grandfather dies and the country falls apart in conflict - was honoured with the MIOB New Vision Award in April, having already won the main prize in Cottbus in 2024."