This year's 15th edition of the international television festival in Bar, Montenegro's biggest seaport, saw a record number of entries. A total of 227 movies from 170 TV companies and TV production companies from around the world arrived in the town.

"Each year, we get more and more partners, friends, and media outlets interested in covering the festival," the executive director of the festival Ljiljana Djindjinović told South East Europe: People and Culture.

Mali, Burkina Faso, Iceland, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Denmark and New Zealand are among the countries that debuted in this year's festival.

The event is traditionally held at the end of October. The entries compete for the Golden Olive award, in several categories. Bar is a city known for its many olive trees. The port boasts what is reported to be Europe's oldest olive tree, planted some 2000 years ago.

"Movie makers from countries in the region are always interested in the festival, they send excellent movies, as the fact that several programmes made by the Croatian broadcasting company and programmes from Montenegro won awards this year demonstrates," says Djindjinović.

This year, a Balkan TV Market round table was organised within the festival.
The conference gathered TV distributors, license owners and representatives. The goal of the round table was to promote the creation of a regional television market in Bar, like the ones in Cannes and Budapest.

Montenegrin director Marija Perović, the round table's initiator and moderator,
told Southeast Europe: People and Culture that the meeting revealed the need for a regional market and market harmonisation.

“My personal impression is that, no matter how many things overlap, despite the relative heterogeneousness of the languages, the creation of a market is being hampered by buyers' illusion that business will be better if they stay out of the open market,” Marija Perović said.

This year's Golden Olive in the category of ecological film went to “Poppy's Promise,” a film from Germany directed by Jan Haft. “Blooming Business,” a documentary from the Netherlands directed by Ton Van Zantvoort was awarded a Golden Olive for best documentary film, while the Italian "Once Upon a Time. The City of Fools," directed by Marco Turco picked up a Golden Olive in the feature film category.

The festival's Grand Prix went to the film "The Moon in You," a Slovak, French and Spanish co-production. Slovak director Diana Fabianova sought to discover why some women have painful periods thus offering a new insight into the topic that is rarely discussed in public.

According to the jury, the director was awarded the prize for a "magnificent, multicultural, inter-disciplinary and extremely well-documented and witty piece of research on a global problem affecting one half of the world's population."

Fabianova interviewed many different people - anthropologists, psychologists, journalists, obstetricians, and even a belly dancer in order to shed more light on this problem.

The jury granted an honourable mention to the movie "A Woeful Song", by the young director from Montenegro, Danilo Marunović. The jury liked this work dealing with drug addiction because of its "quality and professional approach in the special cultural and social context of the Balkans undergoing a period of post-communist transition."