Dr Ray and The Devils closes the festival.

The 40th Belgrade International Film Festival FEST (Feb 24 – Mar 4) closed on Sunday with the premiere of Serbian-Montenegrin film Dr Ray And The Devils by Dinko Tucaković about Nicholas Ray’s attempt to make an auteur film in Yugoslavia in the second half of the 1960s.

This was an appropriate subject for the closing of the long-running festival — which introduced New Hollywood and all other important trends and film-makers to the Yugoslav, and later Serbian public, functioning as a “best of the fests” event.

One of its traditions is to start with the Palme d’ Or winner and accordingly, this year’s edition opened with The Tree Of Life. Screenings included the most important festival films from 2011 and most of the Academy Award nominees. The guest list also reflects the festival’s history, this year Peter Bogdanovich, Menahem Golan and Jiri Menzel were honoured with life-time achievement awards.

Since 2008 FEST has a competition strand called Europe out of Europe which presents a selection of films from non-EU European countries. This year’s winner is Bedouin by Russia’s Igor Voloshin. Croatia’s Aldo Tardozzi won a special mention for Spots.

The jury of Fipresci Serbia voted for Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre and gave a special mention to Sebastián Borensztein’s Chinese Take-Away.

The 40th FEST also recorded a significant raise in box office, with 102,000 tickets compared to 90,000 that were standard in previous five years.

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