The Parade

Srđan Dragojević's The Parade (Serbian: Parada) won the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin International Film Festival 2012 and a Special Mention from the festival's Ecumenical Jury, alongside several LGBTQ+ festival prizes including the Teddy Awards' Siegessäule Readers' Award. It became the highest-grossing domestically financed Serbian-language production at the Balkan box office, and it landed as a real intervention in the politics of LGBTQ+ rights in Serbia and the wider region.

Its premise draws loosely on the actual 2010 Belgrade Pride Parade, the city's first attempt at a Pride march since the violently disrupted attempt of 2001. 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, making the film the year after, deliberately weaves real Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak and Kosovo Albanian post-war tensions over national identity into its LGBTQ+ story: the four central male characters are veterans of the four sides of the 1990s Yugoslav wars.

The financing came from four countries, Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia and North Macedonia, which is unusual for a film whose themes were politically inflammatory in every one of them. Nikola Kojo leads the cast, with Miloš Samolov, Hristina Popović and Goran Jevtić. Belgrade Pride has been held every year since 2014, and academic writing on Serbian post-conflict cultural production has traced The Parade's part in making it an ordinary event.