The Festival of New Chinese Film is due in Belgrade from June 26 to July 1. The International Short Story Festival, due in Kikinda on July 4 and 5, will gather 21 participants from 12 countries, each of whom will present their short stories in their own mother tongue, accompanied with translations on the screen. The Serbian Archives in Belgrade will be hosting an exhibition entitled Culture of the Serbs in Dubrovnik 1790–2010 – From the Treasury of the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Holy Annunciation.
The Festival of New Chinese Film is to be opened in Belgrade on June 26 with a film entitled Mother, directed by Ning Sai, who is one of the guests of honour of this festival. The story is set in the 1960s, at the time when there was big hunger in China and when 3,000 orphans from Shanghai were moved into the inner region of Mongolia, where they found new homes and parents, were given Mongolian names and began a better life. The four-day festival includes six films and one animated cartoon, made in the period from 2010 to 2012. The basic characteristic of Chinese cinema is an inextricable link between tradition and culture, so each of the films that the audience will be able to see at this festival shows the social and economic prosperity of China combined with the tradition and culture of the ancient Chinese civilization.
The International Short Story Festival – Kikinda Short – has been held six times so far and has gathered more than 120 authors from 25 countries. The festival forms part of the European Short Story project. This year’s festival is to gather writers from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Spain, Macedonia, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Switzerland, UK (Wales) and Serbia. The guest of honour is Spain, with representatives of two autonomous provinces: Catalonia and the Balearic Islands. Serbian writer and literary critic Vladimir Arsenić will be a special guest of the festival.
An exhibition entitled Culture of the Serbs in Dubrovnik 1790–2010 – From the Treasury of the Serbian Orthodox Church of the Holy Annunciation has been organized by the Serbian Orthodox Church Community in Dubrovnik, the Serbian Archives in Belgrade and the National Library of Serbia. The exhibitions includes more than 250 valuable exhibits from the funds and collections of the the Serbian Orthodox Church Community in Dubrovnik. The most valuable artefact is the Kiev Gospel, chained in silver and gilt, which was printed in 1833. Other valuable items include various gifts, jewelry, silver plates, ceremonial textile, documents from the Archives, original manuscripts of writers of the Republic of Ragusa, old and rare books dating from periods between the 17th century and the 19th century. The exhibition is accompanied with a richly illustrated catalogue on 430 pages. The value and number of the exhibited items makes this exhibition one of the most important recent cultural events.