Film festival to bring stars to Belgrade (News Feature)

Feb 17, 2009, 1:08 GMT

Belgrade - A star-studded, award-winning movie adaptation of a best-selling German novel will open the Belgrade International Film Festival on Friday.

Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Bernhardt Schlink's best-selling novel, The Reader, will feature Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, and David Kross, in a love story set in post-war Germany.

Fiennes will bring star power to the opening of the 37th Belgrade International Film Festival.

The British actor is no stranger to Belgrade, having visited the capital a few months ago scouting production sites for his directorial debut, an adaptation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus.

The 10-day festival will feature more than 70 films from around the world, including Revolutionary Road, Frost-Nixon, Milk, Changeling, Wrestler, Doubt, Uli Edel's The Baared Meinhof Complex, Il divo, Karen Shakhanzarov's The Vanished Empire, the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading, Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky and local favorite Emir Kusturica's Maradona.

Prominent Russian director Karen Sakhanzarov, American actor David Thornton and French actress Dominique Blanc are also scheduled to attend.

Organisers said more than 30,000 tickets had already been sold, suggesting record-breaking attendance this year.

Belgrade's theatre-goers will have a rare opportunity to see Blanc on stage in Pain, an adaptation of Marguerite Duras' account of waiting for her husband's release from a concentration camp.

Film fans and art enthusiasts will also have a chance to see an exhibit of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski's paintings, and the director himself, hanging in a Belgrade museum.

Over the course of its 40-year history, the Belgrade festival was one of the leading lights of central and Eastern-European cinema.

The festival provided a crucial platform for such classic Serbian directors as Dusan Makavejev, Zivojin Pavlovic, Aleksandar Petrovic and, more recently, Srdjan Dragojevic, Emir Kusturica and Goran Paskaljevic.

In more recent years, the festival drew such international celebrities as Roman Polanski, Victorio de Sika, Kirk Douglas, Jack Nicholson, Robert De Niro, Jim Jarmusch, Johnny Depp, and Beatrice Dalle.

The wars of the 1990s wars and breakup of Yugoslavia took a heavy toll on Serbian cinema and the festival, but festival organisers have worked tirelessly to restore the festival to its prewar prominence.

Reminiscing about the festival before the war, Nenad Jovanovic, a 60-year-old pensioner waiting to buy his tickets for this year's showings, said, 'Those were the days. We had De Niro and Nicholson here. We were the world. It's nice to see movie stars and well-known directors returning to Belgrade.'

'I used to bring my son with me,' Jovanovic told dpa. 'Now he is a film student, and one day I hope his movie will be shown here.'

Four years ago, organisers added the 'Europe outside Europe' competition. This year, a dozen films from European countries that aren't EU members, or countries that are not geographically in Europe, but have close ties with Europe will compete.

Apart from the competition winners, this year's festival will also feature a program devoted to 'new Argentine film.'

And local critics will be waiting for Serbian director Darko Lungulov's debut, 'Here and There,' starring David Thornton and Mirjana Karanovic, which will close the festival on March 1st.

Lungulov, speaking to local journalists, said he was delighted and honoured that his film was was chosen to close the festival where he learned about cinema.