31 August 2010 | Arts festivals flourished when Serbia was in crisis in the 1990s. Ironically, in today’s freer climate, the arts are in crisis, while the festival concept has lost its way.

A crisis seems ever more visible on Serbia’s cultural scene. This year, along with a chronic lack of funds there was a low level of productions at many summer festivals, which originally were designed to revive cultural life in the region during the hottest part of the year.

In the 1990s, following the ex-Yugoslav wars and the isolation of Serbian society in general, the cultural scene was marked by the exceptional level of involvement on the part of artists and by a carefully and accurately gauged cultural strategy.

Both Belgrade and the provinces offered high-quality productions, especially in the arena of theatre, music and cinema. Serbia was visited by many artistic companies, which delivered unforgettable performances. It was as if art provided a form of comfort for the crisis that society was then enduring.

Since then, however, an enormous number of film, music, literary and theatre festivals has grown up in the region, which has made the cultural scene far more complex than before.

According to official data, Serbia annually hands out about 500 literary awards. There are sometimes more film festivals per year than films entered into some competition programmes.

This year, two acclaimed cinema directors, Srdjan Karanovic and Goran Paskaljevic, withdrew their latest films from the competition programmes of many film festivals. According to Karanovic, director of the war melodrama Besa, the huge number of cinema-related festival events meant the awards and the festivals had lost most of their meaning.

Meanwhile, festivals with no artistic content at all, such as Beerfest, are drawing ever-bigger audiences, especially among foreigners and youngsters, overshadowing what was once one of the biggest summer events - the Belgrade Summer Festival, BELEF.

As one of the most important cultural events of the summer, BELEF used to put of a large number of shows and performances during the vacation. Bringing in artists from all over the world and involving theatre, visual and musical productions, BELEF was a major contributor to Serbia’s cultural scene during the summer.

But now BELEF is also suffering an identity crisis. The concept of this year’s festival, “On The New Wave”, represented an attempt “to present Belgrade as the cultural centre of the region, a city that offers an exceptional cultural scene and a tolerant, communicative, urban essence”, Vladan Cerovic, the director, said.

In reality, the programme consisted mainly of performances of well-known musicians and bands, some of which had to be cancelled due to the weather. The abiding impression was that the concept of this year’s musical programme had failed to attract audiences in sufficient numbers.

In the field of visual arts and theatre, results were equally dire. Except for Urban Rabbits, a theatre circus, most appeared ill chosen and the festival itself did not produce any theatre shows, as it did before.

For the first time, the visual programme presented an “Open Cinema”, including film programmes from several alternative, indie and documentary film festivals. But the heads and directors were not in Belgrade when their movies were shown.

In brief, during only the three weeks of its duration, this year’s BELEF was a festival without a concept, criteria, or artistic content.

The question now arising is whether all these festivals should be maintained at a time of economic crisis and whether the crisis on the festival scene is solely the result of a lack of funds.

Judging by the current state of BELEF, it is not. BELEF was founded to add a necessary wave of creativity to cultural policy in Serbia, but that surely didn’t happen this year.

We cannot blame the weather for audiences staying away. The problem goes deeper. A crisis of the mind and of strategy may prove harder to resolve than a crisis of capital.

This article is funded under the BICCED project, supported by the Swiss Cultural Programme. It is courtesy of Balkan Insight, the online publication of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which contains analytical reports, in-depth analyses and investigations and news items from throughout the region covering major challenges of the political, social and economic transition in the Balkans.

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