Radmila Djurica

7th press conference of FEST2010, the International Film Festival in Belgrade, went by pretty interesting, and a dear guest from Greece Dimitris Kerkinos, the director of International Film Festival in Thessalonika talked about well known festival, the program they hold, mainly about giving the possibility for cooproductions to promote projects and screenplay, a pitching prospects, and eliglibility for a film projects to apply for Balkan Fund. The truth is, we do not know much about Greek Cinematography, apart about Theo Angelopoulos, and due to that, Kerkinos took a chance to discuss problems that nowaday Greek Cinematography is facing „ If we look at last year, I can say that it was very good for Greek cinema. However, it is an exception. We had forty films, including documentaries. As for full feature films, there were about 30 of them. Truth be told, these were mostly great films. Although some were commercial and had a great promotion and script, they were not good. Only three or four films were good ones in my opinion. That number includes "Dogtooth", which is screened on FEST. It was also shown in Cannes. The other two were shown in Karlovy Vary, Locarno and Berlin. The problem with Greek film lies in the Law regulating this area, which law is very problematic. Certain directors rose against this law and want it changed. They insist that the state must help cinema more and that TV stations must pay a percentage to film directors after they show their films. These directors are putting pressure on the Minister of Culture to change the law and at the same time they are boycotting festivals. They don’t want to show their films at these events and this includes our festival in Thessalonica. The directors have said they would boycott the festivals until the law is tabled to the Parliament. Everyone now expects that this problem will be solved and a new law adopted, “explained Kerkinos.

The other half of the press conference went on quickly by having in promoting a new book, “A memoirs of Saša Petrović”, a corpus day book that contents documents, manuscripts, screenplay and fragments written by late Serbian film director Saša Petrović. Petrović was also correspondent with well known Croatian novelist Miroslav Krleža, with whom he often discussed aesthetics on film.