The Parade

Srđan Dragojević's The Parade (Serbian: Parada) won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin International Film Festival 2012 and the Special Mention from the festival's Ecumenical Jury, alongside multiple LGBTQ+-focused festival prizes including the Teddy Awards' Siegessäule Readers' Award. The film became the highest-grossing domestic-financed Serbian-language production at the Balkan box office and was widely treated as a culturally significant intervention into the political climate around LGBTQ+ rights in Serbia and the wider region.

The film's framing is loosely based on the actual 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, which had been the city's first attempted Pride march since the violently disrupted 2001 attempt. The 2010 parade went ahead under heavy police protection but was attacked by approximately six thousand far-right counter-protesters who fought running battles with police across central Belgrade for several hours. Dragojević's film, made the year after, deliberately interweaves real Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian and Bosnian post-war national-identity tensions with the LGBTQ+-rights themes — the film's four central male characters represent veterans of the four sides of the 1990s Yugoslav wars.

The four-country co-production drew financing from Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and North Macedonia, an unusual structural achievement for a film with politically inflammatory themes in any of the production territories. The cast is led by Nikola Kojo, with Miloš Samolov, Hristina Popović and Goran Jevtić. Belgrade Pride was held continuously from 2014 onwards as a regular annual event; The Parade's contribution to that normalisation has been documented in academic literature on Serbian post-conflict cultural production.