Tonight, the 52nd FEST ended with the awards ceremony and the screening of the film "The Russian Consul".
The film "Master" by the Russian director Yuri Bykov received the award "Belgrade Winner" as the best film in the main competition program, the award for the best director went to Mladen Đorđević for the film "The Working Class Goes to Hell", while Slavica Šnur and Vlatka Vorkapić won the award for the best screenplay for the Croatian-Serbian film "Holy Family".
Serbian actress Ivana Vuković won the award for the best female role in the film "Za danas tolanik", while the award for the best male role was awarded to the Palestinian Saleh Bakri for his role in the film "Teacher".
The film "Russian Consul" directed by Miroslav Lekić, based on the novel of the same name by Vuk Drašković, is dedicated to Žarko Laušević, whose title role in this film was his last.
The film is about Serbian-Albanian relations in Kosovo and Metohija in the 70s of the 20th century. The main hero of the film, Serbian doctor Ilija Jugović, played by Nebojša Dugalić, is sent to a hospital in Prizren as punishment. There he meets history professor Ljub Božović, the self-proclaimed Russian consul, apparently a psychiatric patient who claims that soon "Russia will become Russia again, and Kosovo will be Serbian again." Local Albanian strongmen, separatists, are turning against Božović. Doctor Jugović defends him.
Announcing the film, director Miroslav Lekić, who is also a co-writer with Igor Bojović, said that this dramatic story has a "clear reflection on the reality we live".
He also stated that the film "anticipates the time to come. Of course, neither Vuk nor we tried to deal with potential solutions, but we wanted to show the way, which is perhaps the only way out of the problem that is still current".
Vuk Drašković believes that "both the film and the novel take us back and remind us of the 70s and 80s of the last century, when there was an eruption of the Kosovo volcano, the lava of which would soon spread throughout that great country that was called Yugoslavia." The times of evil from the 90s are not in the novel or in the film, but in them you can convincingly hear the thud of the coming calamity", said Drašković.
Apart from Laušević and Dugalić, the film also stars Paulina Manov, Svetozar Cvetković, Visar Vishka, Danica radulović, Nada macanković, Mensur Safqiu, Enver Petrovci, Ljubiša Savanović and Petr Zekavica.
