Lopud Artist Retreat 2026
Serbian director Jelena Gavrilović has been selected for the Lopud Artist Retreat in spring 2026. Jelena will spend four weeks on the island of Lopud, working on her first feature film with the working title 13 SQUARE METERS. Jelena has been selected based on her submitted project, as a participant of Slano Film Days 2025.
“I see the Lopud Artist Retreat as the perfect way to isolate myself and truly focus on writing. My goal is to make a deeply emotional film, and I feel it would be much easier to write it in nature than in the city, where it is sometimes very difficult to hear my own thoughts.”
13 SQUARE METERS (working title) – SHORT SYNOPSIS
A romantic boy meets girl melodrama with elements of comedy that questions the possibility of love despite class differences. The film explores the relationship between art, talent, and social class, raising the question of how much a sense of shame contributes to high art remaining reserved for the wealthy.
Jelena Gavrilović was born in 1990 in Belgrade. She graduated in Film and Television Directing from the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade. Her student films BOYS, WHERE ARE YOU (2012), WITH MANY THINGS TO COME (2015), and NOBODY HERE (2017) were screened and awarded at numerous international film festivals, including Locarno, Sarajevo, Winterthur, FIPA, Wiesbaden, and others.
She directed the first web series in the Balkans #JustSaying, which won the prestigious Satellite Award in the Original Short-Format Program category, as well as several other awards worldwide.
She has worked on several TV series, most notably AWAKE (2021), which won the Audience Award at Canneseries, and SHAME (2024), which she directs for Croatian TV and is currently completing the second season.
