Cinema City Film Festival

The Cinema City is an international film festival, which is annually held in Novi Sad. During seven days, Novi Sad becomes cinema city with rich film, music and academic programs. Program concept of the festival comprises film, music and academic programs that will take place at 10 city locations. Film program will present selections of domestic and foreign productions. Over 100 films will be screened at 8 indoor and 2 outdoor locations. The music program of the Cinema City festival includes an opening and closing parties that add a special mood to the festival, along with numerous concerts, VIP parties and receptions for the guests of the festival.

An academic program of the festival consists of over 30 panel discussions with participants chosen beforehand from over 10 countries. During this program, film artists, theorists, critics, and representatives of film institutions will address topics that hold grave importance for film art and film industry. Film artists, theoreticians, critics, and representatives of film industry discuss many significant subjects related to film art and film industry.

Over the past few years, the Cinema City IFF was visited by some of the most important film professionals from the country and the world.

The special guest star of the 2010 Festival was the famous American actress and singer –Juliette Lewis, who performed with her band at the Cinema City music opening on June 5, 2010. Over 80,000 people visited the Cinema City, and clear skies, warm weather, and quality programcertainly contributed to a great number of visitors at open-air cinemas, which are among the strongest points of the Cinema City festival. The audience was also greatly interested in the guest appearance of the Iraqi director, Mohamed Al-Daradji.

Cinema City 2011 presented some of the most significant contemporary authors from the world of independent film. Guests of the Festival, in whose honor Cinema City organized screenings of a number of retrospectives, were the famous Hungarian director Béla Tarr, Lithuanian author Šarūnas Bartas, and Polish director Dorota Kędzierzawska. Domestic film authors also caused great interest, as well as young film artists, the future of domestic film making, who later received a special attention within the platform Cinema Now. In 2011 over 80,000 guests from all over the world visited the Festival.

In 2012 the festival was attended by notable film authors and professionals like Andreas Dresen, Nik Powell, notable producer and director of London Film School, Lorons Hreszberg, director of Forum des Images in Paris, and for the first time in Serbia, the prestigious European Film Academy held its board meeting right here at the festival, when 16 domestic film professionals were elected as members of this renowned film institution.

Cinema City 2013 was held in Novi Sad, from August 26 to September 1, which is a first. As before, it gathered numerous film aficionados and film professionals. The Festival was visited by more than 40,000 film lovers and screened over 100 films at several festival locations across the city. Special attractions in 2013 were the Amstel Open Air – an open-air cinema in the park adjacent to the building of the Executive Council of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, and first 3D cinema in Serbia, called Arena 3D Open Air. The combination of films inspired by strip classics and some of the iconic films released in 3D technology were the main focus of this location. Guests of the festival were one of the most renowned Israeli film producer,Marek Rozenbaum, then the well-known French actor and director, Chad Chenouga, a young German filmmaker and artist, Katrin Gebbe, as well as many guests from the region and the world.

Cinema City annually has over 500 accredited guests, among those: film authors, directors, actors, representatives of international festivals and film institutions, journalists, artists, etc. In addition to prestigious names from the world of film, the Festival’s Up to 10,000 bucks hostsover 300 young authors, who present the future of domestic and international film-making.