Balkan Cinema Surges Into Fall Festivals After Banner Year for Region

It’s been an uncharacteristically strong year for Balkan cinema, with filmmakers from the southeastern corner of Europe fighting — often against all odds — to bring their stories to the screen, despite challenges ranging from civil unrest to moribund support from state-backed funding bodies.

Nevertheless, this year has seen the return of old masters, like Romanian provocateur Radu Jude (“Dracula”), and the emergence of fresh voices, such as Slovenia’s Urška Djukić (“Little Trouble Girls”), alongside triumphs including North Macedonian director Georgi M. Unkovski’s dual Sundance prizewinner “DJ Ahmet” and Croatian director Igor Bezinović’s Rotterdam-winning docu-drama “Fiume O Morte!”

That momentum has carried into the fall festivals, where North Macedonian directors Teona Strugar Mitevska (“The Happiest Man in the World”) and two-time Academy Award nominee Tamara Kotevska (“Honeyland”) both launched their latest works at the Venice Film Festival. They were joined on the Lido by veteran Bulgarian filmmaker Stephan Komandarev (“Blaga’s Lessons”), as well as Romanian director Mihai Mincan (“To the North”), making his second appearance at the festival. Meanwhile, Serbia’s Goran Stanković — best known as the co-creator of the Canneseries award-winning drama “Sabre” — premieres his feature directorial debut “Our Father” in Toronto.

In a fractious corner of Europe where political stability and uncertainty are often the norm, these and other filmmakers continue to propel regional cinema to new heights. Most encouraging of all, a crop of emerging Balkan directors is “creating increasingly daring works, especially with regards to their social and political criticisms of topics ranging from religion, family, gender politics, to corruption at state levels,” according to Dorota Lech, lead programmer of TIFF’s Discovery strand.

That audacious spirit has found its way into movies such as Serbian director Ivana Mladenović’s Locarno competition entry “Sorella di Clausura,” a riotous portrait of a jaded thirtysomething harboring an obsession with an aging pop star, and Mitevska’s “Mother,” which the director describes as a “punk rock” biopic that stars Noomi Rapace as a young Mother Teresa.

Opening the Horizons strand of the Venice Film Festival, “Mother” shows the future saint as the frustrated Mother Superior of a Kolkata convent awaiting permission from the Vatican to establish her own order. In Teresa’s struggle against the male-dominated Catholic power structure, Mitevska says she saw something of herself as an emerging filmmaker in the Balkans, where “it took years [for women] to be taken seriously.”

An iconoclastic director who was, like Teresa, born and raised in Skopje, Mitevska is among the trailblazers who paved the way for a younger generation of Balkan women behind the camera. Praising the “audacity” of those directors for claiming “the right to just say, ‘Fuck it,’ without fear,” Mitevska insists that she’s “always fought to have an equal part in the world we live in,” a sentiment echoed in “Mother” by a steely-eyed Rapace. “I’m a woman in a system run by men,” she complains to her confessor. “Men, men, men.” 

The patriarchy looms just as large in the cloistered world of “Our Father,” Goran Stanković’s riveting debut that premieres in the Discovery section in Toronto. The film follows a recovering addict in an isolated Serbian monastery whose Orthodox patriarch employs unorthodox methods that are often more extreme than effective at getting results.

“Our Father,” which is based on a real events, is a piercing study of authoritarian power and its abuse, a theme that speaks directly to our current historical moment. “When you look at the mechanics of such a group and such a leader, I think you can draw parallels to our contemporary reality,” says Stanković. “Whether it’s Serbia, whether it’s all these countries that have strong leaders that are misusing the trust of the people and using fear.” 

Since last year, Serbia has been in the throes of civil unrest that began with student protests and has now broadened into a wider movement against the government of President Aleksandar Vučić. Though “Our Father” was written before those protests began, the director says the film nevertheless harnesses the energy of this pivotal moment for his country. “It is a warning tale,” he says. “It calls for action.”

The turbulence has had a dramatic impact on film and television production in Serbia, where the state-run film center cancelled its latest round of funding, and where Stanković says “the whole industry is at stake.” Yet that crisis is perhaps emblematic of the reality facing most filmmakers in Southeast Europe, a region that Maša Marković, head of the Sarajevo Film Festival’s influential industry strand, insists “is always in some kind of turmoil.” 

The fortunes of individual industries in the Balkans often rise and fall in “cycles,” says Marković, but “the filmmakers in the region are very [pro-active] in finding new ways to finance films.” More often than not, she adds, “they have to be very flexible” in order to adapt to a shifting political landscape. 

The Croatian and Slovenian industries are enjoying protracted periods of stability, while North Macedonia — bolstered by a change of leadership at its state-run film agency — has had a breakout year, with a trio of films at A-class festivals. Romania, meanwhile, has tried to right the ship after several wayward years of mismanagement at the Romanian Film Center, and a pile of unpaid debts from its cash rebate program that the government is finally close to settling in full.

The system appears to be back on track, but Mihai Mincan — whose latest film, “Milk Teeth,” premieres in the Venice Film Festival’s Orizzonti sidebar — says he still feels “completely unsupported by the Romanian state.” While small groups of filmmakers continue to work in their own “little churches,” as he describes it, Mincan insists: “I don’t think we have an industry.”

“Milk Teeth” draws on the director’s own coming of age at the tail end of the communist era in Romania, just as the country was making its uncertain transition to democracy — a time the director describes as “the most beautiful moment” of his life.

“There was so much hope in the air,” he says. “We had expectations, and we had dreams, as all young people do. But Romania has this amazing talent at crushing your dreams very fast.”

That is perhaps in part because the fall of strongman Nicolae Ceaușescu, which ushered in the democratic era in Romania, brought along with it a headlong rush toward a turbo-charged model of capitalism whose calamitous, long-lasting impact can be felt — in Romania, and across its former Eastern Bloc neighbors — to this day.

It’s there in recent Romanian films including Mladenović’s “Sorella di Clausura” and Jude’s 2024 Berlin prizewinner “Kontinental ’25,” as well as in Stephan Komandarev’s Venice premiere “Made in EU,” which follows a coronavirus outbreak in a Bulgarian sweatshop. The film, set in a provincial town in what the director describes as “one of the poorest regions in Europe,” highlights what he calls a Bulgarian ethos of “working till you drop and barely making a living.”

If the filmmakers of Southeast Europe are united by a common history and a shared experience of today’s hardships, they’re also joined by a spirit of togetherness: most of the films to emerge from the region are multi-country co-productions that rely heavily on collaboration with neighboring nations.

Still, cultural support for many countries in the region is in decline, with Mincan noting that “it’s harder and harder to build co-productions.” The director believes Balkan filmmakers should instead take inspiration from the indie American movement of the ’90s, when directors like Jim Jarmusch, Kelly Reichardt and Quentin Tarantino made “films with a lot of attitude that didn’t care…about financial support.”

That revolutionary decade, which Mincan notes produced scores of “super low-budget films, [with] universal themes, done very fast without a lot of money,” gave a voice to directors who were determined to make their movies, with or without the support of the studio system.

It’s a spirit that would do just as well for Balkan filmmakers who are determined to meet the urgency of this moment, with Mincan insisting: “We’re living in a world where if you have something to say, it’s important to say it now.”