A Success Story from the Culture for Democracy Project
For one week each summer, Požega, a small town in western Serbia, becomes an unlikely crossroads of world cinema. This August, for the twenty-first time, the Interaction festival brought together around a hundred filmmakers, students and mentors, from the United States and Mexico to India and Japan, for screenings, workshops and a shared documentary film camp. Its alumni now number more than three hundred, spread across sixty-two countries; some, like this year’s camp mentor, first came to Požega as students and returned as award-winning directors. Alongside the international programme run local strands too, a competition of short documentaries, a Teen Doc workshop for high-school students from Serbia, Montenegro and North Macedonia, and screenings that draw in the town’s own audiences, from schoolchildren to their parents.
Photo: Matija Štifanić
Interaction is the visible face of Filmart, an independent organisation founded in Požega in 2005 and devoted, over nearly two decades and more than sixty-five projects, to a simple and stubborn idea: that serious cultural work does not have to happen only in capital cities. It has built audiovisual education for young people in rural and often overlooked parts of western Serbia, and turned a small town into a place where local stories meet global audiences.
Yet behind every edition of a festival like this stands something an audience never sees. Someone has to raise the money, hold the partnerships together, keep the accounts, and make sure the organisation is still standing when the next year comes around. For all its international standing, Filmart has worked the way most of Serbia’s independent cultural scene works, project by project, edition by edition, its future resting on the energy of a few people and the outcome of the next application.
Photo: Aleksandra Žunić, Srđa Čvorović, Matija Štifanić
This is where the Culture for Democracy project enters the story, and where its support is deliberately different. Through its Boost Grant, Culture for Democracy is not funding a single festival but the organisation behind it. Over three years, the support, a process Filmart has named Filmart Forward, goes into precisely the parts of the work that no programme brochure advertises: a permanent fundraising and development team, the organisation’s first multi-year strategy, income diversified beyond reliance on any single donor, and clearer internal systems for finance, administration and communication. It is an investment in continuity rather than in any one event, in the institution that makes the events possible.
The success worth telling here, then, is not only the festival that has just closed to full houses. It is the quieter achievement taking shape around it: an organisation learning to outlast any single grant, so that a small town in western Serbia can go on drawing the world toward it, year after year. Interaction shows what independent culture in Serbia is capable of. Filmart Forward is about making sure it can keep doing it.
Filmart’s organisational development is supported through the Swiss project Culture for Democracy project, implemented by Heartefact.