The Belgrade premiere of the film ‘Mouth Full of Earth’ (Usta puna zemlje), which Puriša Đorđević finished just a few weeks before he left us on 23 November last year, will close this year's edition of FEST.
The great Serbian filmmaker had his wish fulfilled posthumously, since in 2021, upon receiving the Belgrade Victor for Contribution to Film Art at the 49th FEST, he stated that he would like his next film to be screened right at this festival.
‘Puriša Đorđević deserves all possible honours in this field of ours and within the FEST programme. However, as a programme selector, I would like to emphasize that the film "Mouth Full of Earth" did not have the honor of closing the festival out of respect for the recently deceased great filmmaker, but because Puriša Đorđević created a great work of art based on an equally great novel by Šćepanović’, said Jugoslav Pantelić, artistic director and selector of FEST and added:
‘Đorđević's film is a symphony to life, to the meaninglessness of life that ultimately gains its meaning. Thanks to Puriša, watching us from above, for restoring our hope in the authorship that Serbian cinema deserves with this film. Without any hesitation, I single out “Mouth Full of Earth” as the biggest surprise from the entire programme of this year's FEST, which I sign as a selector.’
The film ‘Mouth Full of Earth’ is a screen adaptation of Branimir Šćepanović's novel of the same name, directed and written by Puriša Đorđević. The leading roles are played by Radivoje Raša Bukvić, Sonja Kolačarić, Andrija Kovač, Lazar Jovanov, Aleksandra Rukavina and others.
In his long and fruitful career, Mladomir Puriša Đorđević (1924-2022) shot more than 80 feature and short films, which were screened at the most prestigious world festivals in Venice and Berlin. He won several Golden Arenas at the Pula Film Festival in Croatia, the most important film festival in the former Yugoslavia. His film ‘Noon’ (Podne) was shown at the first FEST in 1971, and at the press conference in 2021, exactly 50 years after the screening, he stated: ‘I visited FEST, I chose films and I knew which directors I wanted to see. And now I have lived to be blown away by its artistic director.’
