The 59th edition of the most important festival in Serbia and the Yugoslav region, the historic BITEF, should have taken place in November this year. But the party didn’t take place. Its artistic director, Miloš Lolić, resigned from his position after presenting his programming to the festival’s board of directors. The problem: the director tried to get the board of directors to approve the inclusion of Milo Rau’s work on the trial of Gisèle Pelicot. It was impossible. A decision behind which the new reality of Serbian politics was hidden.
“It all started a year ago, in the edition in which Milo Rau arrived with another work, Antigone in the Amazon. He was given the opening speech and there he said things that upset the government”, explains Miloš Lolić, who is now also organizing a guerrilla festival which will take place in Belgrade from December 15 to 18. “It has been a very difficult year, a lot of things happened in Serbia”, explains this theater director who enthusiastically admits to this newspaper that he was in Belgrade when the city was bombed by NATO in 1999 during 78 days. “That year there was a festival. And I was there before too, when I was a teenager and there was war in Yugoslavia. During these years, even without money or an international presence, BITEF continued to take place. Nothing could stop the festival, now they won’t either,” he concludes.
Several reasons explain the cancellation of this historic celebration. The first was the aforementioned Milo Rau speech. A speech in which the Swiss artist confessed his love for the Serbian people, but accused the European Union of collusion with the Vučić regime. Specifically, Rau denounced mining exploration in the Jadar Mountains to extract lithium by the transnational corporation Rio Tinto. At that time, Chancellor Olaf Scholz had just visited Serbia to carry out surveys. Lithium is essential for making ion batteries for electric cars.
“Scholz urged Serbs to sacrifice for Europe. Europe of course means Volkswagen,” Rau said in his speech. “There I saw that the German ambassador was leaving the event terrified,” Rau recalled in statements to the newspaper. “But the people applauded, it was not a speech against Serbia, no one agrees with the mine, it is a project which does not help anyone, which does not bring money, only to the corrupt elite who facilitated the agreement. It is not good for the country, it will destroy the ecosystem. And that is what I said, that some people who call themselves nationalists were destroying the nation with the connivance of Europe”, continues Rau.
The second reason for the disappearance of the festival is Serbia’s political drift in recent years. Aleksandar Vučić began his career in the Serbian Radical Party, a far-right party that supported the concept of Greater Serbia. Already in the 21st century, he founded the Serbian Progressive Party with Tomislav Nikolić, with whom he came to power in 2012. Nikolić was president and Vučić was prime minister. During these years, Vučić defended Europeanism and became a mediator in the conflict with Kosovo. But in 2016, when he became president, Vučić began to show his most reactionary side.
Serbia’s international policy is largely based on the European Union’s promise to include Serbia among its members, which this Balkan country formally requested in 2012. Tension between the EU and Serbia is very high today. Especially since its president has decided not to condemn the invasion of Ukraine and its ties with China and Russia are strengthening every day. Relations between Europe and Serbia hang by a thread. This is why Milo Rau’s speech hit where it hurt the most.
Milos Rau Movement
Milo Rau is brand new The Pélicot trial at the Dramatten in Stockholm. There he also presented his play Another Nobel Prize dinner. The chosen day could not have been other, December 10, the same day as the Nobel Prize banquet with the kings. “In this other dinner, instead of the king’s speeches, the voice is given to the 18 people who imploded the prizes in 2018 by accusing the Nobel Prize for Literature, Jean Claude Arnaux, and managed to have the prize suspended that year,” specifies the director. “I think it’s an appropriate balance with The Pélicot trialsevery time we travel around Europe people say that of course this is happening in France, that they are all perverts. And that’s not true, the problem comes from a system, not a nation,” he explains.
Rau is now preparing to arrive in Belgrade with his team to create this work created at the Avignon Festival and which represents on stage the legal process where the repeated rapes that Gisèle Pelicot had to endure were recounted in detail. Since the work was censored in Serbia in September this year, Rau, from the platform of his festival in Vienna, has denounced the censorship. Solidarity in Europe has spread like wildfire.
This is not the first time that fascism has attempted to destroy democracy. They’re not going to stop. This is why we understood that we needed to weave a transnational solidarity network
Milo Rau
— director
Milo Rau is a great theater director, but he is also a born activist. From the Wiener Festival that he directs, Rau created a political platform, Resistance Now, in August 2024, on the occasion of the dismissal of the director of the Slovak National Theater, Matej Drlička. This is how what is today one of the major European platforms was born which tries to fight against political interventionism in the face of the rise of the far right in Europe.
In trying to explain the reasons for the creation of this movement, Rau looks back on the past: “Since 1989, in Central Europe, everyone has signed up to democracy as a business and left aside ideology, a very neoliberal vision that predominated until recently. But at some point, neoliberal elites joined forces with the oligarchs through nationalist movements. anything that was experimental or weird“.
The Swiss director says that the right saw a possibility in the world of culture, “they understood that this culture war was very good propaganda. Today we all talk about gender, language and family politics. Until recently we could talk about refugees, about social classes, it seems that is not the case today”, he says with a certain sarcasm.
Rau believes that the moment Europe is experiencing is more than delicate. “People are voting for the new fascism, they have had enough of the left-wing regime. Central Europe is experiencing Russification where liberal democracy is just a simple awakened philosophy,” he says. “This is not the first time that fascism has tried to destroy democracy. They are not going to stop. This is why we understood that we had to weave a transnational solidarity network, because when an artist is attacked by political interventionism, he finds himself too exposed in his country, without support, as is the case today in Serbia,” he explains.
Serbia and the “postnada” generation
In Serbia everything is different since on November 1, 2023, at Novi Sad station, a glass roof collapsed and killed 16 people. This sparked the student uprising against the right-wing authoritarian government of Aleksandar Vučić. Nothing has ever been the same. The civil protests that took place in Serbia over these two years were historic. But President Vučić remembers the color revolution in Georgia in 2003 which overthrew Eduard Shevardnadz. He does not want the country to become uncontrollable and has deployed a repressive and social control policy that has affected the cultural sphere.
In 2023, the city of Belgrade enacted a new law affecting the city’s 14 festivals by which the city’s secretary of culture would be present on their boards to be able to control the programming. Additionally, the country’s Ministry of Culture withdrew support in 2025 from festivals that were uncomfortable. The consequences for BITEF were direct. The artistic direction was reduced from a four-year mandate to two years. Nikita Milivojević was hired but was fired after Milo Rau’s speech. And the festival’s budget was cut in half, from around 340,000 euros to 170,000 euros.
Very shortly, five months before the festival, Miloš Lolić was appointed artistic director. Lolić tried to revive the festival. The program was small, the work of Milo Rau, brothers by the Italian Romeo Castellucci and a program of new Serbian artists. But everything collapsed with Miloš Lolić’s refusal to accept the censorship imposed by the board of directors.
Ana Janković, a 33-year-old artist from Belgrade, was scheduled to perform at the festival. Today, December 16, he will premiere his play in Belgrade, Suicide as a social fact at the new festival. Ana studied at the Faculty of Performing Arts in Belgrade, where all the student protests that shook the country were born. When she talks about the political reality in which she lives, she is categorical: “We are the generation posnadawe live in a totally destroyed system, a corrupt system full of nepotism where there is no place for justice, workers or knowledge. The only thing you need to survive is a card from the ruling party,” he said harshly.
Asked about the importance of the new NE:BIFEST festival, the Serbian creator says that “it was the theater students who started the protests in this country and who denounced what is happening”. “But this does not happen in theaters, what is done there has nothing to do with Serbian reality. This is why the festival is important, because it opens a breach in a silent stage panorama,” he concludes.
NE:BITEF (the prefix NE in Serbian means both “no” and “independent”) will be produced without any artist being paid for their work. The chosen spaces are very symbolic, in addition to the faculty of performing arts where Rau will make his debut, Romeo Castellucci will exhibit a film of his work brothers at CZKD, an emblematic counterculture space in Belgrade that began its struggle against the government of Slobodan Milošević in the 1990s.
Furthermore, to top off this guerrilla festival where entry will be free, the technicians of Erwin Piscator’s legendary Berlin theater, the Volksbhüne, have decided to go to Belgrade to give concerts with their punk groups Pink Wonder, Ubili Su Batlera and Anima. The three groups will play under the theme: the struggles of forgotten workers. “Future generations will look back and say that ‘this is the year BITEF was born,’” concludes Milo Rau, who also admitted to this newspaper that he feared he would not be able to enter Serbia for the premiere on the 15th. “They tell me that there may be problems at the border, we will see,” he says cautiously.
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