Concering news from Serbia, as the Board of the Belgrade International Theater Festival (BITEF) has rejected the programme planned by festival's artistic direction team - and blocked Director Milo Rau from attending the 59th edition of the festival.
As outlined below, this follows comments in Serbian media that Rau's speech at the Festival in 2024, which mentioned environmentally harmful mining practices around the world and in Serbia, were the "reason why the Secretariat for Culture of Belgrade this year decided to slash by half the festival’s budget and not renew the mandate of the previous artistic direction."
Read below a press release, issued by the Artistic Direction Team for the 59th edition of BITEF. They declare: "BITEF must remain a platform for engaged voices that critically observe reality. We strongly oppose the position of the Festival Board that director Milo Rau, as well as any artist in the world, can be a persona non grata at the Belgrade International Theater Festival."
Both Miloš Lolić and Borisav Matić have therefore requested a mutual termination of their contracts and are no longer in the mentioned positions.
PRESS RELEASE REGARDING THE 59th BITEF 2025
(Left to right: Borisav Matic, Milos Lolic (c) Marko Krunić)
A historic year for BITEF!
The Board of the festival has rejected the planned program of the festival's artistic direction team because of one “undesirable” artist. This is a precedent: in the continuous 58 turbulent years during which the artistic direction has always been responsible for BITEF's program, there has never been a recorded case of the Board holding the arrival of a foreign guest to Serbia.
This year, by majority vote, the Board decided that the Swiss director Milo Rau should not come to BITEF. The mere mention of his name was enough for the emissary of the Secretariat for Culture Ana Veljković, the journalist Borka Golubović Trebješanin, and organizer Srđan Obrenović to vote against the program of the artistic direction, while the actor and the president of the Board Svetozar Cvetković was the only one who voted in favor of the program.
At the Board meetings, there was never even a word of discussion about the theme or quality of the selected performance “Pelicot Trials”, directed by Milo Rau, nor was it taken into account that this guest performance would be an exclusive event of global significance, considering that the show premiered only a few months ago. This would make Belgrade the fourth city in the world to host it, after Vienna, Avignon, and Lisbon. The majority of the Board was also uninterested in the fact that the guest performance was the result of collaboration between BITEF and the Wiener Festwochen, currently one of the most relevant theater gatherings in Europe. The Board also ignored that the termination of months-long negotiations for the guest performance would damage the decades-long reputation of our most important festival.
One of the Board members asked: “Haven't we learned anything from last year?” But there was no answer to the counter-question: “What were we supposed to learn?” At the opening of last year's edition of the festival, Milo Rau delivered a speech in which he mentioned environmentally harmful mining practices around the world, including in Serbia. This speech – full of quotations from the history of theater and drama – has been cited by the media as the reason why the Secretariat for Culture of Belgrade this year decided to slash by half the festival's budget and not renew the mandate of the previous artistic direction.
Until a week ago, the possibility for the 59th BITEF to take place at all depended on whether the artistic direction team would agree to sign a censored program, with a gaping hole in place of Milo Rau's performance, or to fill that hole with “whatever,” as suggested by the Board. That “whatever” is an equally important part of the problem, as it confirms that some on the board are fundamentally uninterested in the quality of BITEF's program or in the concept behind it. To abandon the curated program as a whole, which we have been developing for months, would mean our complicity in the erosion of the artistic direction's autonomy and the very principles of the festival.
The artistic direction team of the 59th BITEF (Miloš Lolić, Borisav Matić, and, until recently, Ana Vujanović) shares the conviction that a progressive and socially provocative festival such as BITEF must be a relevant actor in times of historical upheaval. Despite working in completely inadequate conditions (such as extremely short deadlines, budget uncertainty, and late engagement of international and local collaborators), we have managed to finalize a coherently curated and production-wise realistic program that we fully stand behind with our integrity.
The conceptual framework of our BITEF program addresses the theme of systemic violence – from police brutality to economic, gender-based and sexual violence. We juxtapose two leading voices of world theater (Milo Rau and Romeo Castellucci) with emerging Serbian voices (Andreja Kargačin, Ana Janković, Aleksander Zain, and the Action Committee - a collective of students from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts). These underrepresented young artists are ready to challenge the rigid theatrical form, imposed identities and the very notion of authorship, determined to resist the repressive system.
After making an exceptional contribution, Ana Vujanović withdrew from the joint struggle for an institutional BITEF, explaining her decision as follows: "The main reason for my withdrawal is the strong stance of colleagues and cultural workers around BITEF and within my close circle in Belgrade, who believe that holding the festival under these conditions would mean supporting an illusion of normalcy. That may or may not be true, and it's difficult now to reach any objective truth, but I have decided to respect that position and side with the truth found in people."
In recent months, we ourselves within the team discussed the position of BITEF in the face of unlawful and repressive actions by the authorities against the cultural scene and the wider community. We insist that political compliance must not be a guiding curatorial principle and that any violation of freedom guaranteed by the Constitution, including the freedom of speech of foreign and domestic artists, is unacceptable. BITEF must remain a platform for engaged voices that critically observe reality. We strongly oppose the position of the Festival Board that director Milo Rau, as well as any artist in the world, can be a persona non grata at the Belgrade International Theater Festival.
Team of Artistic Direction of 59th BITEF
Milos Lolic
Borisav Matic
