First Crossings: Main Prize Goes to Serene Valley from Zagreb’s Academy of Dramatic Art

The first part of the festival is now behind us, bringing with it several important festival milestones. On Friday evening, at Palazzo del Cinema in Gorizia, we presented the First Crossings Award for Best Student Short Film, while also celebrating the official presentation of the Darko Bratina Award 2026, which went to Romanian director and visual artist Alexandra Gulea.

This year, the First Crossings Award was decided by an international jury composed of Alessandro Comodin, João Nicolau, Ester Ivakič and Jukka-Pekka Laakso, who selected the best student short film from among the works by emerging filmmakers.

The First Crossings Award for Best Student Short Film went to Serene Valley by director Sebastijan Borovčak, from the Academy of Dramatic Art at the University of Zagreb.

The jury selected the film with the following statement:

For a film that rows up as an exception in the selection. It is a film that gives the audience a room to judge themselves.

Special mentions went to the film Strigoi by director Rei Grando from the Academy of Arts, University of Nova Gorica, for the creative use of cinematic tools, and the film Herein by director Tobias Bohunovsky from the University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten (USTP), for mastering the storytelling.

The First Crossings awards ceremony thus placed young filmmakers and their diverse ways of finding their own cinematic language at the centre. As the jury emphasised:

We want to encourage not the students but the professors to let students think out of the box and find their own voices.