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Helena Wittmann Receives the Underground Spirit Award; Germany in Focus at the 33rd European Film Festival Palić

09.07.2026.

Filmmaker and artist Helena Wittmann is this year's recipient of the Underground Spirit Award, presented by the European Film Festival Palić in recognition of outstanding achievements in independent filmmaking and a distinctive authorial vision beyond the mainstream film industry.

Her films, including her debut feature Drift (2017) and her latest feature Human Flowers of Flesh (2022), have been screened and awarded at major international festivals, including Locarno, Venice, Toronto, Rotterdam, Mar del Plata, Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, Viennale, FIDMarseille, and FICUNAM, as well as at institutions such as Tate Modern and MoMA. From 2015 to 2018, she taught at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, and was also a mentor at the Elias Querejeta Zine Escola in San Sebastián, Spain. In addition to filmmaking, she creates installation works and collaborates as a cinematographer with various directors and artists.

As part of the program dedicated to this year's Underground Spirit Award recipient, the films 21.3°C, Ada Kaleh, The Wild, Later, The Swell, A Thousand Waves Away, and Drift will be screened.

This year, Germany is the country in focus in the Country in Focus program at the European Film Festival Palić. The program will feature the films Women as Lovers by Koxi, Home Entertainment by Dietrich Brüggemann, and The Land Within by Michael Kofler, alongside twenty short films. The Germany in Focus program is presented in cooperation with German Films, the national agency for the promotion of German cinema abroad.

The 33rd European Film Festival Palić will be held from July 18 to 22, 2026, in Palić and Subotica.

The European Film Festival Palić is supported by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Serbia, the Provincial Secretariat for Culture, Public Information and Relations with Religious Communities, the City of Subotica, the European Union through the Creative Europe MEDIA program, as well as numerous partners and media sponsors.

For more than two decades, Gorky List has been a valued partner of the European Film Festival Palić, serving both as an integral part of its visual identity and as the sponsor of the Gorky List Audience Award, which encourages audiences to engage more deeply with the films presented at the festival.