27/05/2008 12:59

Pedja’s Film Collection

Petar Protić (1967) Pedja, a librarian from Novi Sad, started collecting movies in 1987, when he was a student of Yugoslav literature. A year later, he printed catalogues of his collection and developed a lucrative business of taping the movies to film lovers, collectors, and video clubs. Thanks to the fact that in the early nineties, the shelves of the video clubs were filled with movies of low artistic value only, adventurous video club owners saw an alternative in this collection - works of true and everlasting cinematographic value.

During the nineties, this kind of market, and interests for the quality film were brought to extinction, so Pedja made his movies available to people from Novi Sad, in Studio 24, the foyer of Serbian National Theatre, and later, in Prostor bookshop, but soon after, he was disappointed because people did not appreciate his efforts and they acted carelessly to the borrowed tapes. This is why he closed his collection to the public in 1996.

He made his movie available again only five years later, to young enthusiasts gathered in the organization of Exit festival. During the first two years of the festival, movies by Chaplin, Kurosawa, Venders, Woody Alan, Fassbinder, and cult Fritz the Cat by Ralph Bakshi were shown.

This film enthusiast tries to keep a cosmopolitan, spiritual, and of course, cinematographic conscience of his contemporary fellow townspeople and good-tempered guests with movie nights and cycles in new media centre “Kuda” (2003, 2004), and after 2004, with Pedja’s Film School, on Fridays in Art Clinics. The movie projections are free of charge; everyone is welcome, and the “professor” if available for questions and conversations.