The Industry Department of the San Sebastian Festival has been organising its Focus On since 2014. Under the initiative, a group of professionals from a country, region or territory comes to the San Sebastian Festival to expand its contact network and participate in the Industry activities.
This year, thanks to the collaboration with the Film Center Serbia (www.fcs.rs), six Serbian producers (namely: Marija Stojanović, Nikolina Vučetić, Miloš Ivanović, Filip Marttinović, Miroslav Mogorović, Marko Jocić) will have the opportunity to meet partners for their projects in San Sebastian and to increase their co-production opportunities with other European and Latin American regions and countries.
El camino del sur, by Juan Batista Stagnora, was the first co-production between Serbia and Argentina in 1988. Almost 35 years down the line, the Film Center Serbia will present its programmes of tax incentives and production grants to potential partners in Latin America with a view to relaunching these co-productions. In this respect, the institution will give an award coming with 3,000 euros to one of the projects presented at the Forum.
In 2016, Serbia introduced a series of incentives for audiovisual production thanks to which fiction, non-fiction, animation, television and commercial productions shot in Serbia have the option to receive rebates of up to 25% of their grant-eligible expenditure (20% in some cases). In addition, when the expenditure is greater than €5M, the incentives increase to 30% of the grant-eligible expenditure.
The presence of Serbian co-productions has been a constant at the latest editions of the San Sebastian Festival: this year, the Croatia-Serbia co-production Garbura / Carbide, by Josip Žuvan, will compete in New Directors; in 2020 Sutemose / In the Dusk, by Sharunas Bartas participated in the Official Selection; as did Soldatii. Poveste din Ferentari / Soldiers, Story from Ferentari, by Ivana Mladenovic in 2017, amongst others. Furthermore, in 2004 the Serbian director Goran Paskaljevic won the Special Jury Prize with San zimske noci / Midwinter Night’s Dream.
The initiative was launched in 2014 with the Focus on Canada, thanks to the collaboration with Telefilm Canada, a territory with which the Focus on was repeated in 2015 in view of its success. In 2016, in collaboration with the film institutes of Denmark, Iceland and Norway, the initiative celebrated the Focus on Nordic Glocal, dedicated in 2018 to the Baltic countries; in 2019, thanks to collaboration of the Polish Film Institute, the Focus on Poland; and, in 2021, the Focus on Georgia, with the collaboration of the Georgian National Film Center.
