Belgrade Students Beat Off Stiff Competition to Triumph in Europe
Europe salutes Serbian entrepreneurs as a talented team of Belgrade students beats the odds to win at the Sustainable Energy Europe Awards.
Strawberry Energy were invited to the seat of the European Union in Brussels to attend the European Commission’s prestigious award ceremony (12/4/11). Not only did they hold their own alongside far more established businesses and brands – they walked away with the trophy.
Their win came in the ‘Consuming’ category for their Strawberry Tree public solar powered phone charger, imagined, designed and delivered by Strawberry Energy’s charismatic CEO Miloš Milisavljević. The device, deployed outside EU offices in Brussels during the event, was rewarded as the best within ‘projects, activities or services designed to help reduce energy consumption’.
New UK Immigration Cap Restricts Non-EU Workers
Major immigration changes have come into place to restrict the number of non-EU workers moving to the UK. The Home Office has imposed an annual cap of 20,700 on non-EU people coming to work in skilled professions, as a boost to home-grown employment.
From today, people coming from outside the EU wishing to work in the UK will need to have a graduate level job, speak an intermediate level of English, and meet specific salary and employment requirements
Šišanje / Skinning : A Serbian Film Worth Watching
Skinning (Srb: Šišanje) tells of high-achieving Belgrade student Novica (Nikola Rakocević), and how he falls under the spell of far right extremism to set off an horrific chain of events. From Serbian director Stevan Filipović, this is a strong film that sticks with you long after the impact of the end credits and their victims roll call.
Šišanje / Skinning : Director Had ‘Moral Responsibility’ To Make Movie
For his second outing as a director, Stevan Filipović has produced an astonishing film addressing Serbia’s issues of ultra-nationalism, alleged church corruption, and society’s lack of accountability – a state he claims he had ‘a moral responsibility to explore and explain‘.
On release in Serbia, the public voted with their feet. In less than a month,Šišanje (English title:Skinning) attracted an audience of 44,000, making it one of the country’s most popular recent films.
Filipović says it is a film that would have been impossible to make even a decade ago, and unimaginable under the Milosovic regime. Even now, it has struck a raw nerve in Serbia where the crew received threats of violence from ultra nationalist groups, the premiere was heavily policed, and right-wingers called it criminal and anti-patriotic.
What cannot be faulted is that this provocative and uncompromising film has achieved something rare: it has held up a mirror and generated healthy and sometimes heated debate. After a private screening at the British Parliament, as part of Serbian Week in Great Britain and attended by the Serbian Ambassador, the film and its context again raised a spirited debate among the Serbian diaspora
