27th NITRATE FILM FESTIVAL
Yugoslav Film Archive, 1 Uzun Mirkova, Belgrade, Serbia
6-17 June 2025
The 27th Nitrate Film Festival will screen nearly 50 films from twenty-three countries in Europe, Asia, North and South America from June 6 to 17 at the Yugoslav Film Archive. The festival’s director and curator Aleksandar Saša Erdeljanović, has announced that festival will feature a variety of genres from both the silent and sound eras of world cinema. Among the highlights are several films that were believed to be lost for decades, along with many rare works saved through digital restoration.
This year’s opening ceremony at the Makavejev Hall will feature Léonce Perret, masterpiece Koenigsmark (1923) which tells the story of intrigues in an imaginary kingdom and features Svetislav Ivan Petrović, a well-known international star of Serbian descent, in his first role in a French film.
The traditional program The Others About Us, which features old documentaries and feature films about Serbian and former Yugoslav cities and landscapes, will show The House Savoy: Private life of the entire Italian royal family, by Luca Comerio. This film offers a glimpse into Vittorio Emmanuel’s court life, focusing on his relationship with his children and wife, Helen of Savoy, the daughter of Montenegrin King Nikola Petrović.
The festival will also feature three previously unseen segments from the American newsreel Fox Movietone News from 1930, which was filmed in Belgrade. These segments include footage of the railway bridge , a joint address by Yugoslav Foreign Minister Vojislav Marinković and US Ambassador John Dyneley Prince, and recordings of the King’s Guards’ singing and dancing exercises.
The important part of this program includes materials from Banja Luka’s amateur film collector Goran Barać’s 16-mm films Jajce, Mostar, and Herzegovina (1929) and Ljubostinja Monastery and Vrnjačka Banja (1932), and materials from Banja Luka’s amateur cinematographer Aleksandar Bojko’s 8-mm collection.
Nitrate 27’s rich program also features four early silent short burlesques by the legendary duo Laurel and Hardy, from 1927-1928 period, the feature-length documentary India (1958) by Roberto Rosselllini; the classic work of the French crime genre Symphony of a Massacre (1964) by Jacques Deray; a film about the strike of Hamburg dock workers The Brother (1929) by Werner Hochbaum; an adaptation of Maurice Maeterlink’s fairy tale The Blue Bird (1918) directed by Maurice Turner; a movie epic from the life of ancient Rome, based on the classic novel Quo Vadis (1924) by Henryk Sienkiewicz and directed by the duo Georg Jakobi – Gabrielino D’Annunzio; the Swedish psychological drama, The Woman Without a Face (1947) by Gustav Molander, co-written by Ingmar Bergman; the Argentine horror film The Black Vampire (1953), by Román Viñoly Barreto, and many more.
This year, as is customary, the Archive will welcome over thirty film professionals, film historians, directors, and archivists from twenty countries. Director Erdeljanović emphasizes that this will provide a new opportunity for colleagues to discuss important challenges in film archiving, future collaboration on film restoration, and the exchange of knowledge, ideas, and film programs.
