Yerevan: An evening of culture and Serbian documentary film at the Ujan Apricot Tree International Film Festival
On this occasion, a delegation from Serbia visited Armenia at the invitation of the festival organizer and the famous Armenian director Garegin Zakoyan, and the visit was completed with significant support of the Ministry of Culture and Information, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Embassy of the Republic of Serbia in Yerevan.
The delegation consisted of playwright, director and film historian Božidar Zečević, director Maja Novaković, whose film “Then comes the evening” was shown as part of the festival's regular programme, ethnologist-anthropologist from the Ethnographic Museum and executive director of the International Ethnological Film Festival in Belgrade Saša Srećković, artist Simonida Stanković, researcher Maša Vukanović from the Institute for the Study of Cultural Development, as well as philologist and translator Karina Avagjan.
During the part of the programme dedicated to Serbia, eight short documentaries were shown, from 1962 to modern times, a short concert of Serbian traditional music was held, as well as a cocktail party organized by the Embassy of Serbia in Yerevan.
Ambassador Panajotović Cvetković greeted the guests, introduced the participants from Serbia and spoke about the importance of such events, i.e. the retrospective of the Serbian documentary film in order to bring the cultures and friendly peoples of the two countries closer.
In his speech, Garegin Zakoyan called the Serbian Evening a kind of “festival within a festival,” since for the first time the entire festival day was dedicated to one country. He reflected on the intensive film cooperation with Serbia so far and presented plans for the future connection of documentary film festivals in Belgrade, Yerevan and Tehran.
The event was attended by a large number of guests, representatives of the diplomatic corps and Armenian institutions, Serbian diaspora, film buffs and friends of Serbia.
During their stay in Armenia, guests from Serbia visited the Embassy of Serbia in Yerevan, where they exchanged information and ideas for future cooperation between Serbia and Armenia in the field of culture.
