Editor's Note

This year’s edition of the Festival is one of the final steps on the way to the silver jubilee – the Festival’s 25th anniversary. The uninterrupted continuity behind us and paths ahead impose a duty to persevere with programmes that are designed and conceptualized with the aim of achieving а professionally, versatilely and finely composed fusion of artistic and anthropological contents and forms. For all these reasons, this year again, we will jointly evaluate works presented within the competition and informative selections, as well as no less important programmes included in the Festival Plus. In order to continue the analysis of previous contributions, both those made by ourselves and inputs from the immediate and distant environments, special programmes will feature the film production of museum ethnologists from Western Serbia, as well as and the first three Grand Prix winners at the Festival of Ethnological Film (originally the Festival of Video and Ethnological Film)...

Marko Stojanović
Executive Director of the Festival

Three-Minute Anthropology

Over the past two decades, global digitization, networking and the expanding use of mobile phones have been accompanied with an excessively massive (and steadily increasing) production and distribution of various visual materials. A huge content production and high view rates have led to establishing festivals of micro movies, which have been organized since the early 2010s. Such festivals screen short films (micro movies) that are mostly shot using mobile phones, distributed through the internet and, as a rule, watched on the third screen. The specific feature that places the third screen into a separate category is mobility, which makes content intended for it – including micro movies – available wherever their authors and audiences may be. Another important characteristic of micro movies is the fact that most of them (except from the advertising ones) are createdin a process in which the production and consumption of visual materials are not separated, but are part of a single, indivisible relationship...

Ljiljana Gavrilović

Ethnographic Institute of SASA
Department of Ethnology and Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade

Ethnological Film as a Cultural Resource – a suggestion for consideration

The technological outburst in the area of moving pictures in the 1980s, which first resulted in the VHS technology and was soon followed by digital images, i.e. cheap cameras affordable to the so-called wide masses of population, was the beginning of a great democratic revolution in film production. Suddenly, the camera became an everyday object that enabled almost everyone to become a cinematographer, director, screenwriter. Soon afterwards, affordable computers and simple software tools enabled almost everyone get involved in movie editing. Namely, the conditions have been created to record the important things that surround us and encourage everyone to try themselves in artistic expression...

Miroslav–Bata Petrović

ROUND TABLE: THE FESTIVAL AND THE NATIONAL CINEMATOGRAPHY – THE WAY OF (NO) RETURN!?

For years, the preparations for and the work on the Festival of Ethnological Film have been accompanied with an observable, significant and progressive decrease in interest on the part of production companies and independent authors from Serbia in participating in this event. Initiated under significantly different circumstances and encouraged by the (in a way coerced) existence of a number of local TV stations in Serbia, during the first decade, the Festival also relied on the then current production of various departments of the Radio Television Serbia and immeasurable contributions of amateurs. However, a change in the structure of films within the main festival programmes, which involved the rising share first of regional and then of international authors, has placed local films in an unfavourable position. The final blow came in the form of an apparently growing gap between the technological potentials of local and international authors, the elimination of the amateur section of the programme and, finally, the awarding policy.