Award-Winning Films from Three Continents on the 19th Free Zone Tour Across Serbia

Six of the top-rated films from last year’s Free Zone Film Festival will be screened for free this spring as part of the 19th traditional Free Zone Tour, taking place across Serbia, from Subotica to Surdulica.

In collaboration with local cultural centers, community centers, libraries, and other institutions, the tour will visit over 50 cities, towns, and municipalities until June 20. Audiences will have the chance to watch four feature films and two documentaries: No Other Land (Palestine), There’s Still Tomorrow (Italy), My Favourite Cake (Iran), Simon of the Mountain (Argentina), Lars is LOL (Norway), and Maga 1909 (Serbia).

The tour kicked off in late March with screenings in Zaječar, Požega, and Kraljevo, and continues in Bor, Zaječar, Ruma, Vrnjačka Banja, Opovo, Prijepolje, Guča, and beyond. You can find the full program here.

The films present powerful and moving stories about love, identity, social injustice, and (un)favorable political and societal conditions.

Freshly awarded the Oscar for Best Documentary, No Other Land is the debut film of a four-member Palestinian-Israeli collective. It follows Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, who has been resisting the systematic demolition of homes and the mass expulsion of his community by Israeli authorities since childhood. He is joined in this struggle by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who seeks to share the reality on the ground with his fellow citizens.

The film has won nearly 70 international awards, culminating in the Academy Award at the 97th Oscars in early March.

The dark comedy drama There’s Still Tomorrow, more popular than Barbie and Oppenheimer in Italy, was directed, written, and starred in by Paola Cortellesi. She plays Delia, a housewife in post-war Rome who is verbally and physically abused by her husband and father-in-law. Though set in the past, the film sparked a national conversation in Italy about domestic violence, femicide, and women’s rights, highlighting how little has changed. It won six awards at the David di Donatello (Italy’s equivalent of the Oscars).

My Favourite Cake, directed by Iranian filmmakers Bentahsh Sanaeeha and Maryam Moghaddam, is a tender drama about a lonely widow who invites a taxi driver into her home in hopes of ending her isolation. The film is one of the first to depict a woman without a hijab since the 1979 Islamic revolution, featuring rarely seen scenes of women drinking alcohol, smoking, and kissing men. As a result, the filmmakers are under house arrest and receiving anonymous death threats.

The film received the Ecumenical Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Award at the Berlinale, and was also recognized at festivals in Chicago, Calgary, Barcelona, and Belgrade — earning a Special Mention in the International Selection at the 20th Free Zone Festival.

The experimental documentary Maga 1909, directed by video artist and editor Branka Pavlović, explores the life of Marija Maga Magazinović (1882–1968), Serbia’s first female journalist, feminist, activist, and pioneer of modern dance. In 1909, she visited Berlin and attended Isadora Duncan’s school — a trip that changed her life and the course of modern dance in Serbia. The film features choreography by dancers from Belgrade and Berlin, performed at original locations where Maga lived, studied, and worked.

Youth and inclusion are central to two of the films:

Lars is LOL, by Eirik Sæter Stordahl, tells the story of Amanda, a girl assigned to mentor Lars, a new classmate with Down syndrome. Appalled at the thought of being in the spotlight, Amanda fears social disaster — but to her surprise, the two form a genuine friendship.

The film won Best Youth Feature at the 75th Berlinale from the European Children’s Film Association (ECFA), the only industry-selected award of its kind, and was also named Best Teen Film (EU Teen Zone) at the 20th Free Zone Festival.

Simon of the Mountain, by Federico Luis Tachella, follows a young man whose perspective on life is transformed through interactions with children with developmental disabilities. They teach him how to let go and embrace the joy of life. The film won the Grand Prize in the Critics’ Week sidebar at the 77th Cannes Film Festival.

The Free Zone Tour is one of the most significant cultural decentralization projects in Serbia. Its goal is to build and educate film audiences in smaller communities, where such cultural experiences are often unavailable.

This initiative has existed almost as long as the festival itself, which for two decades has brought film lovers together each November in Belgrade, Novi Sad, Niš, and Kragujevac. The tour brings a cinematic experience to smaller towns through free screenings of selected films from the festival’s main program.