Serbian Directors Create a Sensation

Belgrade, Dec.2, 2009 (Serbia Today) - The films of Serbian directors keep winning awards at international film festivals. Thus the debut of young director Darko Lungulov, creator of ‘Here and There’, recently won seven awards at prestigious international festivals.
It won three awards at a prestigious International Film and TV festival Cinéma Tous Ecrans in Geneva 0 – the Golden Reflexion for Best Direction, FIPRESCI award of international film critics and the Titra award.
At US festivals, the film won four awards - Spirit of Independence, for best foreign film direction and for best actor in a foreign film, awarded to David Thornton, who plays the main role.
It was also proclaimed best foreign film in the Orlando film festival. In June, at the international film festival in Hoboken, USA, David Thornton won the award for best actor.
At the prestigious Tribeca International Film Festival in New York, the film was proclaimed best New York narrative. It also won a special jury award at the Skip City Festival in Japan and was shortlisted by critics as the ‘Variety’ film magazine at the festival in Karlovy Vary.
At the recently held film festival in Thessaloniki, it won the second ‘audience award’, while the first award went to another Serbian film, The Honeymoon, by Goran Paskaljević. ‘Here and There’ is to participate in several other international festivals and has been included in cinema distribution in Germany, Switzerland, Greece and Hungary. Under way are negotiations with distributors in the USA, where the film is to be shown next year.
The story is about an American who meets a Serbian immigrant in New York and they agree that the latter should marry the former’s girlfriend in Serbia to obtain a green card. IT occurred to Lungulov during his film studies at a college in New York. In this tale of a quest for hope, the main roles are played by Serbian actors Branislav Trifunovic, Mirjana Karanovic, Jelena Mrdja, American actor David Thornton and Cindy Lauper, a music star of the 1980s.
Darko Lungulov was born in Belgrade and went to New York in 1991. He studied cinema at the City College of New York. In the period from 1997 to 2003, when he returned to Belgrade, he made a documentary film ‘Escape’, which was awarded by the audience at the Hamptons Festival in 2004 and was shown at numerous world festivals.