Cinema of Serbia - Serbian Theatre and Cinema

Serbian Theatre and Cinema

Serbia has a well-established theatrical tradition with many theatres. The Serbian National Theatre was established in 1861 with its building dating from 1868. The company started performing opera from the end of the 19th century and the permanent opera was established in 1947. It established a ballet company.

Bitef, Belgrade International Theatre Festival, is one of the oldest theatre festivals in the world. New Theatre Tendencies is the constant subtitle of the Festival. Founded in 1967, Bitef has continually followed and supported the latest theater trends. It has become one of five most important and biggest European festivals. It has become one of the most significant culture institutions of Serbia.

The cinema was established reasonably early in Serbia with 12 films being produced before the start of World War II. The most notable of the prewar films was Mihailo Popovic's The Battle of Kosovo in 1939.

Cinema prospered after World War II. The most notable postwar director was Dušan Makavejev who was internationally recognised for Love Affair: Or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator in 1969 focusing on Yugoslav politics. Makavejev's Montenegro was made in Sweden in 1981. Zoran Radmilović was one of the most notable actors of the postwar period.

Serbian cinema continued to make progress in the 1990s and today despite the turmoil of the 1990s. Emir Kusturica won two Golden Palms for Best Feature Film at the Cannes Film Festival, for When Father Was Away on Business in 1985 and then again for Underground in 1995. In 1998, Kusturica won a Silver Lion for directing Black Cat, White Cat.

As at 2001, there were 167 cinemas in Serbia (excluding Kosovo) and over 4 million Serbs went to the cinema in that year. In 2005, San zimske noći (A Midwinter Night's Dream ) directed by Goran Paskaljević caused controversy over its criticism of Serbia's role in the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s.

Several Serbian-American filmmakers have established a loose, intellectual multi-mediamaking tradition, working within prominent academic institutions and also creating works marked by high stylistic experimentation. Three figures here would include Slavko Vorkapic, creator of famed montage sequences for Hollywood films and Dean of the USC Film School; Vlada Petric, television and film director, archivist, and founding curator of the Harvard Film Archive; and Vladan Nikolic, creator of the Zenith film and transmedia project as well as Professor at the New School for Social Media in New York City.