Merlinka about life's universal themes

The 15th Merlinka International Queer Film Festival will be opened tonight in Belgrade's Dom omladine with the film "Grown Up Enough" by Goran Stolevsky, and it will be closed by the latest work of this author from North Macedonia who lives in Australia - "Housekeeping for Beginners".

"Grown Up" tells the story of a one-day, unexpected and intense romance between a seventeen-year-old Serbian Latin American dancer and his best friend's older brother. "Household for Beginners", Stolevsky's second film at this festival, is a Macedonian candidate for the Oscar, and it already received the "Queer Lion Award" at this year's Venice Festival, where it was the only representative from the Balkans. With the story of Dita, who never wanted to be a mother but still raises her partner's two daughters, she asks universal questions about the family we were born into and the one we chose.

Between these two films, more than a hundred titles will be screened during the four days of the festival: foreign feature films, feature documentaries, short feature and documentary films, and animated films.

Among them are seven fiction and documentary productions from Serbia and the region: "Murder in a Vegan Way", "Clear Sky", "Olujka's Show", "Kviroslavija" and "Ex-You" from Serbia, the Croatian film "Knowing Maria" and Montenegrin film "Jolie".

Tonight, at the opening of the Merlinka festival, it will be 20 years since the death of Vjeran Miladinović Merlinka, after whom the festival was named. Also, in front of the large hall of the Belgrade Youth Center, the exhibition "Enough with silence" will be opened with works from the comics of the same name about intersex people.

S.Ć./Nova.rs

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