Dear viewers,

You could read the title of the Serbian competition film “Where the Road Leads” programmatically – where is the journey actually going? For all of us, but mainly for the protagonists in the fourteen competition films of this year’s CINEDAYS. Protagonists on the road and off the road who face the challenges of everyday life with a lot of courage and wit, naivety and anger, from the wasteland of a Slovenian village to the omnipresent Greek mother, from the latent hostility that waits behind the friendly faces of a gated community just as much as in a remote Anatolian village. But the attempts to move boundaries end in the realisation: in the end, the rules are made by others. For stuttering rappers, men on day-release, war veterans on PTSD, women of all ages and lovers who no longer want to be just the two of them. At least you can jump over your shadow for a film length, even if you fall hard on the ground afterwards. These films could all be described as romantic tragicomedies that manage to bring together musical and dystopia just as much as darkwave and techno club. Highly emotional and razor-sharp analytical – cheers to every attempt to test boundaries, to cheerfully mix genres, to occasionally blow the whistle on the plot and in the process to put oneself, the world and the audience to the test: between self-confidence and the courage of despair, not always quite clear and also sometimes doomed to failure: on the road to nowhere, but also for one’s own and the collective self.