BELGRADE: Serbian-German filmmaker Ivan Marković’ hybrid feature Promised Spaces has been selected for Cannes Film Festival’s sidebar programme ACID 2026. Bologna-based Luminalia is handling its world sales.
The film has been done as a coproduction of France, Germany, Serbia, and Cambodia, and at one of its earlier stages it was supported by Film Center Serbia.
Sleepless from the heat, Sokun leaves his crowded construction dormitory and joins a community of fellow workers living in one of many unfinished high-rises. One such tower offers a long-awaited luxury home for its first tenant, Seda, who soon feels trapped in the vast gated complex.
Blending fiction with non-professional actors and real locations, Promised Spaces unfolds as a reflection on how speculative urban growth reshapes identities, communities, and the meaning of home.
„Promised Spaces explores how architecture embodies social segregation, isolating people across class divides. Merging fiction with real locations and non-actors, the film follows characters from different social strata (construction workers and residents of luxurious gated communities) to show Cambodia’s rapidly expanding urban landscapes. Through fragments of contradicting yet coexisting realities, it traces how speculative urban growth reshapes identities, communities, and notions of home“, Ivan Marković told FNE.
Marković directed from the script he wrote in cooperation with Tanja Šljivar. Katharina Hauke and Ivan Marković lensed the film, and Marković himself is its editor. The film features: Vollak Kong, Chea Loch, Vita Vong, Lyer Von,Theara Or, and Kanitha Tith.
It was produced by France’s Bocalupo Films, in coproduction with Germany’s Fiskultura Films, Serbia’s Big Time Production and Cambodia’s Anti-Archive.
ACID will be held 13 – 22 May, and the Cannes Film Festival will take place from 12 to 23 May 2026.
