Nitrate Film Festival begins on Friday

BELGRADE - The 16th Nitrate Film Festival will be held in Belgrade June 6-15 and include around 60 old films from around the world, with half of them dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War One, head of the Yugoslav Film Archive Aleksandar Erdeljanovic has announced.

There will be 28 film archives and similar institutions taking part in this year's festival, which is a record.

This year's event is symbolically entitled Gone with the Nitrate and will open on June 6, Yugoslav Film Archive Day, at the archive's new building.

"Many films from this programme will be screened in Serbia for the first time. Those are films about the Serbian people and army from the period of the Great War. The French military film archive, British archive and other specialised museums have been of great help to us," Erdeljanovic told a news conference.

Copies of documentary films made in 1913 and 1914, during the Second Balkan War and up to the start of World War One, will be shown screened at the opening, for the first time in Serbia.

Erdeljanovic drew attention to the part of the programme entitled Others about Us, which will cover the period from 1913 to 1920.

The premiere of the 5-hour TV series Apocalipse: World War One, which has so far been shown only in France, will be the culmination of the festival programme, he stated, adding that material from the Yugoslav Film Archive had been used in the creation of the series.

Besides the war portion of the programme, the festival will also include films of different genres made by some of the most famous directors of the first half of the 20th century, like Carl Theodor Dreyer, Yakov Protazanov and Francesco Rosi.

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