General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Parade

The Parade (Serbian: Parada) is a 2011 Serbian comedy-drama feature film written and directed by Srđan Dragojević, in which a homophobic Serbian gangster and war veteran agrees to protect the first successful Belgrade Pride parade after the police refuse to do so.¹^•² It premiered in Belgrade on 31 October 2011 and was a four-country co-production of Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia, and Slovenia.¹ The film won the Panorama Audience Award at the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in 2012 and became one of the most-watched Serbian films in its domestic market.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Original / international title	Parada / The Parade¹
Director and screenwriter	Srđan Dragojević (born 1963, Belgrade), his seventh feature film⁵^•⁶
Premiere	31 October 2011, Belgrade¹
Co-production	Delirium (Serbia) with Mainframe Production (Croatia), Sektor Film (North Macedonia), and Forum Ljubljana (Slovenia); supported by Eurimages¹
Running time	Reported as 115 minutes by Cineuropa; other catalogs list 116, 117, or 120 minutes²^•⁷
Budget	Estimated at 1,303,250 EUR, including 200,000 EUR of Eurimages co-production funding⁷
Principal awards	Panorama Audience Award, ecumenical jury special mention, and Siegessäule readers award at the 62nd Berlinale (2012)³

Spoilers

Plot

The film centers on Limun (Nikola Kojo), a homophobic, middle-aged Serbian gangster and war veteran who owns a private security company, and on Radmilo (Miloš Samolov) and Mirko (Goran Jevtić), a young, successful gay couple living in Belgrade, where they face daily abuse from a homophobic majority.¹^•⁸ Mirko is a gay rights activist whose dream is to organize the first successful Pride event in Belgrade. The premise is grounded in recent Serbian history: an attempt to hold Pride in 2001 ended in bloodshed, and a decade later nationalist and neo-Nazi organizations prepared violence against any new parade while the police refused to provide protection for participants.¹

Through a series of coincidences, Limun agrees to protect the parade. In the version summarized by Cineuropa, he cannot find support among Serbian friends unwilling to be associated with gays, so he turns to his old enemies from the Balkan wars of the 1990s: the Bosnian Halil (Dejan Aćimović), the Croatian Roko (Goran Navojec), and the Kosovo Albanian Azem (Toni Mihajlovski).² The German-language synopsis adds a wedding-planning frame: Limun's fiancée Biserka (Hristina Popović) has hired the gay Mirko as her wedding planner, and she makes her consent to the marriage conditional on Limun's security firm protecting the Pride parade.⁹ After a road trip through the former Yugoslavia in a pink car, the unlikely crew defends the marchers against nationalists and neo-Nazis; in the film's ending, the character played by Goran Jevtić is killed during the march.⁹^•⁴ The FCS synopsis states that a homophobic former criminal and war veteran finds himself cooperating with a gay activist to protect Serbia's first Pride parade.¹^•²¹

Production

Filming began on 25 March 2011 on locations in Croatia.⁸ The film was co-produced by Serbia, Macedonia, Croatia, and Slovenia with support from Eurimages, with Igor Nola (Mainframe Production, Croatia) and Vladimir Anastasov (Sektor Film, Macedonia) among the co-producers alongside Biljana Prvanović of Delirium.⁸ The Slovenian film database records a budget estimate of 1,303,250 EUR, with grants including 200,000 EUR from Eurimages, 15,000,000 RSD from Film Centre Serbia for production co-financing, 700,000 HRK from the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, and 5,000,000 MKD from the Macedonian film agency.⁷ Cineuropa additionally lists backing from Prva Srpska Televizija, the Ministry of Culture of Montenegro, and others, with Film and Music Entertainment (F&ME) among the production companies.²

The crew included cinematographer Dušan Joksimović, editor Petar Marković, composer Igor Perović, production designer Kiril Spaseski, and costume designers Stefan Savković and Jelena Đorđević.¹ The supporting cast included Mira Stupica as grandmother Olga, Nataša Marković as Lenka, Mladen Andrejević as Đorđe, and Radosav Milenković as Kekman.¹⁰

A crucial scene was shot at the actual October 2010 Belgrade Pride parade, the second in Serbia's history and the first in which participants were not beaten off the streets; Dragojević remarked that the only success of that march was that the participants stayed alive.¹¹ The film features footage of that 2010 parade.¹²

Release and awards

The film premiered in Belgrade on 31 October 2011, with an earliest release date of 3 November 2011 listed for Serbia and Montenegro by Box Office Mojo; it later reached Sweden on 30 November 2012 and France on 16 January 2013.¹^•¹³^•² At the 62nd Berlin International Film Festival in 2012 it screened in the Panorama section and won the Panorama Audience Award for fiction film, a special mention from the ecumenical jury, and the Siegessäule readers' award; the Serbian government site confirmed the Panorama Audience Award, shared that year with the documentary The Artist is Present about Marina Abramović.³^•¹⁴ It also won the audience award at Festróia 2012 and best international film at the Galway Film Fleadh 2012.¹⁵ At the Pula Film Festival 2012 it received Golden Arenas for best script and for best actress (Hristina Popović).¹⁶ In Slovenian distribution it earned the Zlata Rola award for surpassing 25,000 viewers.⁷

Reception and themes

The film was a commercial success in its home region. Cine.com records a budget of about 1,300,000 EUR against worldwide receipts of $2,492,128, with an IMDb rating of 7.3.¹⁷ A Serbian retrospective notes that since its 2011 release it has remained one of the most-watched Serbian films in cinemas both in Serbia and in the region.⁴ Serbian columnist Marko Vidojković commented that Dragojević had effectively organized "the biggest Gay Pride in the Balkans" through the film's popularity.¹⁸

Critics and scholars have read the film as a tragicomic confrontation between two worlds in contemporary Serbian society, the traditional, conservative, and homophobic majority and the liberal, modern, and open-minded minority.⁷ A Serbian Film Centre discussion describes it as a parodic comedy, often satirical and absurdist, in which the director parodies the stereotypes of the 1990s and those about homosexual people, while inserting brutal realism, notably the ending and a closing title card on the position of LGBTQ people in Serbia; the same discussion calls it the first commercial Serbian film to treat the oppression of the LGBTIQ community, bringing the subject to a wide audience.⁴ Academic commentary has been more divided. One analysis notes that the film depicts all its central veteran characters as embodying criminality and war profiteering, with the Kosovo Albanian Azem shown trafficking heroin to NATO soldiers, and observes that the film reserves its only depiction of sexual violence for a scene implying the rape of a Serbian school teacher by Bosnian soldiers.¹⁸ Another scholar argues that the film promotes a depoliticized ideal of sexual politics and mirrors debates within Serbian LGBT activism over Pride organizing.¹⁹ A study of popular post-Yugoslav cinema describes it as a Serbian-North Macedonian-Slovenian-Croatian co-production about a homophobic gangster who recruits a troupe of ex-Yugoslav "enemies" to protect a Pride event, and counts it among the region's films that reached a significant national and regional audience.²⁰

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2011 to 2012 › Released in 2011

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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