Andrijana Stojković, member of the Selection Commission for the Domestic Competition Programme

DOCUMENTARY – A FORGOTTEN PRODUCTION CATEGORY SERIOUSLY AND CRITICALLY DURING SELECTION

First, i want to say that the Selection Commission (Danica Acimovic, Feliks Pasic, Andrijana Stojkovic) worked seriously, and was very critical while selecting the films for the Domestic Competition programme.

I have noticed that, in almost all the documentary films that I have seen, a common problem is the fact that they were made and prepared in a short period of time. This is another thing that shows that the documentary with us is in some corner of the production, that those who work on it are either the people who like it, or the students, the people learning the film. It is obvious, so, that in our film production there is no room for the documentary.

I have to praise, when we talk about the documentary films, the Workshop VARAN, from the faculty of Drama Arts. It seems to me that what they have done presents a hope for our documentary, i.e., for the young people that would like to work on this genre, and even to work on it in a way different than that used by televisions.

This year, the themes that our authors dealt with are much wider and more diverse than usual. Our burning topic is of course – Kosovo, and these films are in a special programme. In the competition part, the films deal with a wide range of themes, from staging a play in England up to some very little intimate stories. Of course, there is something that is now already in the tradition of the Serbian or the Yugoslav documentary film, and it is dealing with “ special people ” , the heroes of ordinary life.

There were few animation films this year, and so there are few of them in the competition programme as well. This is a bit of a surprise as there used to be quite a lot of them, both those from the Danube School and those from [AFT. I don ' t believe that the people from [AFT, for example, did not have a production, and thus it seems to me that their complete absence from the Festival this year is due to some other reason. In addition, there are almost no experimental films. As it is a customs, the short feature films come from the faculties of film, mainly from the Faculty of Drama Arts, and I must admit, the films from this school that have been selected, are all of a high quality.

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