The second edition of ne:BITEF will take place on 20 September.
The second edition of ne:BITEF, the self-organised guerrilla theatre festival born out of the crisis engulfing Belgrade’s official BITEF, will be held on 20 September across 60 locations throughout Belgrade, marking 60 years since the founding of BITEF.
Under the slogan BITEF is wherever we gather, the programme will run from 12 pm to 6 pm across the 60 symbolic micro-stages, before participants and audiences convene at the Centre for Cultural Decontamination (CZKD) from 7 pm for the festival’s closing programme. Entry to all 60 locations will be free.
This year’s edition is conceived as a collective, horizontally organised festival of micro-stages, each showcasing an artist, collective or work that has marked BITEF’s six-decade history. Each stage will be curated by a local cultural worker nominated by the community. Instead of institutional theatres, the specially devised performances, exhibitions, workshops, post-show discussions and gatherings with artists will take place in independent social and cultural centres, bookshops, cafés, private apartments and other spaces across the city. Audiences will be able to follow a map and schedule, to be published on the festival’s website, and design their own personal BITEF walk through Belgrade.
Starting at 7 pm, the closing segment of the program at CZKD will transform into a communal space for encounters, conversations, and artistic actions. The evening will be dedicated to resistance and solidarity, values the organisers describe as the foundation of a living, open and free theatre.
BITEF was due to hold its 60th, jubilee edition this year. However, the festival has spent the past two years mired in programmatic, and administrative pressure. The crisis dates back to September 2025, when BITEF’s Board rejected the programme curated by that year’s curatorial team Miloš Lolić, Ana Vujanović and Borisav Matić, because it included a work by Swiss director Milo Rau, who had publicly criticised a mining project considered a strategic priority by the Serbian and German governments. The curators resigned, and every theatre invited to the Board’s hastily assembled replacement programme refused to take part. As a result, BITEF was not held in its institutional form last year for the first time in the festival’s 59-year history. In response, part of the cultural community organised the first ne:BITEF in December 2025 as a guerrilla-style edition of the festival held outside the institutional theatre system.
Organisers describe this year’s ne:BITEF as a continuation of last year’s “collective, rebellious and freedom-loving act of civil disobedience and creativity.” This year’s ne:BITEF is supported by the Centre for Cultural Decontamination and the Goethe-Institut. A detailed programme and map of all 60 locations will be published in the coming weeks on the festival’s website and Instagram page.
Further reading: The international community resists the state capture of Bitef
Further reading: Serbian theatre: Between resistance and appeasement
Divna Stojanov is a dramaturg and playwright. She writes mainly for children and young people.
