The interview with Miloš Lolić and Borisav Matić, curator and member of the Artistic Directorate of the 59th Bitef, which we are publishing in the new issue of "Vremena", was at great risk of failing on the day the issue was published.
Namely, not even twenty days before the announced start of this our biggest international theater festival with a great reputation in Europe, it is not known if it will be held this year at all, and if so, when it will be held.
Miloš Lolić, a European director, and Borisav Matić, a playwright, spoke to "Vreme" about the problems that led to the aforementioned uncertainty. At the time we spoke, the Bitef festival did not have a team of artistic directors because the contract with them was terminated, since the Board of the Bitef festival did not accept its selection.
I feel proud.
In particular, he did not allow Milo Rau, the director who opened last year's Bitef with a speech against Rio Tinto, to come to the festival, and whose new play Pelico Process based on the trial for the mass rape of Gizela Peliko in France, which Lolić and Matić proposed to them. The public, domestic and foreign, called this move by the Board censorship.
Lolić and Matić wanted to speak together, as a team. This is their first interview about the obstacles facing the 59th Bitef.
"I feel proud that in the worst conditions we managed to curate an eloquent and provocative program, I feel defeated because someone decided to prevent the performance of that program. I feel grateful because every day we receive letters of support from all over the world. I don't know how we will be remembered except as a phantom artistic director who prevented our most important festival from being suitable for those who are incompetent," said Miloš Lolić regarding the fact that their choice initiated the first censorship in the history of Bitef.
"It is significant that the three members of the Committee, who voted against our program, did not send a single word to the public about their historic decision and the scandal that reverberated in European theaters. They do not take even a minimum of responsibility, just as it can be seen in the minutes of the Committee meetings that they did not offer a single valid argument why Rau should not participate in Bitef," said Borisav Matić, commenting on the Committee's action.
All for 20 million
The city assembly decided that 20 million dinars was enough for the program of the 59th Bitef, which Matić described as "a humiliating budget that is not enough even for festivals of a smaller scale, let alone for such an important international festival. However, we refused additional sponsorships and deliberately tried to function only within the impossible budget, not as proof that the festival can survive even without invested money, but to avoid further inflow of problematic private interest into a public good such as Bitef".
Why did they even agree to create the program in such a situation?
"Although some of my close friends and colleagues were of the opinion that this year's Bitef, crushed by the City Assembly, should be boycotted, I didn't want to just throw away the challenging opportunity to fight for Bitef's autonomy and integrity from the inside," says Lolić.
About the same, Matić said: "We wanted to shape resistance through our work in culture, so that culture would not remain marginalized during current social changes."
***Read the entire conversation in the new issue of "Vremena" from Thursday (November 6) or **subscribe to the affordable digital edition
