Magnificent 7 Festival Belgrade
Text from festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, Magnificent 7 festival in Belgrade:
The Magnificent Seven festival, created as a cinema holiday for numerous devotees of modern European documentary film, has successfully presented top achievements and the most significant authors of the contemporary European documentary scene for the past 20 years. This year, certainly one of the most turbulent in the last few decades in Serbia, the entire culture suffered unexpected blows from the institutions that are in charge of nurturing, encouraging and developing it, and thus the festival found itself under the attack of those illegal and undeclared measures of repression, discrimination and elimination. First of all, the elimination of superb culture as too subversive and dangerous for the dark order now nakedly based on brutality and primitivism.
Since its first edition, The Magnificent Seven festival has been dedicated to the mission of presenting high-quality cinema documentaries that helped us to discover the world from which we were exiled during the nineties, to recognize our true place at the beginning of the XXI century, to understand better ourselves and to be enriched by unforgettable new experiences. But an equally important mission was to present the real Belgrade, the spirit of this area and our culture to eminent European guests, together with the magnificent festival audience. Genuinely impressed prominent documentarians are still spreading the word throughout Europe and the world about what they found to be an amazing festival and a bright city always open to new trends and ideas, which has been enchanting them year after year with its warm atmosphere and people. In this dramatic year, in addition to fantastic historical ups and downs, to the horror and despair of many of us Belgrade has suffered drastic destruction. One of the darkest points is the triangle between the festival’s venue, the Serbian Parliament and the Assembly of the City of Belgrade, an area where the festival atmosphere has been intensively spreading in previous years.
In addition to all that, threats, brutal violence in the streets, people being taken away as in the times of notorious military junta dictatorships, led the festival to the most difficult but inevitable decision – this year’s edition of The Magnificent Seven will not take place in the planned September date. If the basic meaning of the word festival is a celebration, then for the expected celebration of a modern documentary film, we beleive that at this moment we have neither the opportunity, nor the reason, nor the right. Still, despite everything, we hope to meet again in the near future.
Photo from 2019, Zoran Popovic and Tue Steen Müller with the Parliament in the background, where a demonstration took place. Today it looks different: https://orf.at/stories/3404233/
