Palic is a resort town in the Baden-Baden style, a relic of glamorous 19th-century spa culture. Flowery gardens, colonnades, ornate fretwork, hand-fired tiles, pressed tin emblems, grand imperial staircases, vaulted ceilings as scalloped as seashells, blue and ochre exteriors vibrating with floral cascades and shooting stars. A yellow biplane trolleys back and forth, showering us all with doses of mosquito repellent. Communism is no more and Serbia is able to enjoy again its luxuriant romantic traditions, 30ft-high billowing curtains, lake views and endless fields of sunflowers. Demilitarised, it has no argument with anyone any more and is knocking at the door of the EU with confidence. 

I have an odd karmic relationship with Serbia, not just because I was awarded funds from the Serbian Government to make my film on the inventor Tesla in 2003, the day before Zoran Djindjic, the Prime Minister, was assassinated (he took the film development to his grave). It’s not that to which I refer, though. I am apparently the Fritz Lang of Serbia, the foreign director whom Marshal Tito promoted to demonstrate his cultural sophistication and openness, while tying his own directors to the mast of state censorship. Every Serbian between 20 and 60 was weaned as a baby or made high as a teenager on my films, heaven help them. The older festival participants are prone to bursting into tears and clutching their chests when they meet me. I can’t tell you how gratifying that can be, when my own homeland has a rather more ambivalent relationship with me. But hey, we’re a nation of laceratingly witty know-alls, myself included. 

Luckily, film has no frontiers. It speaks a universal language and I am glad to be one of its translators. That’s why I won’t give up this monkey business, even when well-meaning scoffers put their hands around my best intentions and squeeze, not altogether gently.

And monkey business it is. The biggest news at the festival was not my receiving the prestigious Aleksandar Lifka Award for cinematography, or the precious bottle of home-made apricot brandy (later confiscated by a Hungarian border patrol), but that the first screening was held of a movie made entirely by a monkey. Capucine the (capucine) monkey has made his international debut with his masterpiece Oedipe. You’re hearing it here first — film history happening right now. We filmgoers whose ragged hopes have been downgraded to this season’s film equivalent of a ride on a Richard Branson space-cruiser are setting our sights on a Moon landing again.

Remember the hypothesis that 20 apes locked in a room with a typewriter will eventually reproduce the works of Shakespeare? Well, it took only three years of experimentation and one monkey. A scientific lab in Japan working exclusively on the development of communication with primates narrowed down its search for the best and brightest to one particular capucine who was the only one of a group not to smash the handheld film cameras that they were given to explore. 

Capucines are the small, agile monkeys with big hairy brows above their soulful eyes, making them appear from a distance to be wearing a tiny bullfighter’s hat. They are often trained as aides to quadriplegics and our hero was no exception. He left his day job with the blessing of his physically challenged human companion to enter a film school devised by the Japanese scientists.

Capucine was slowly encouraged to handle the rather unwieldy film camera (no digital here) and was put through a training programme of watching films from cinema history, specifically King Kong, Tarzan the Ape Man, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, E.T. and The Jungle Book , as well as the oeuvres of directors Kurosawa, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Welles, Godard, Bunuel, Chaplin, Spielberg and Kubrick.

The debate over whether a video image is apparent to an animal as a symbolic narrative or is just a cloud of incomprehensible dots was settled by this gifted monkey, who in tests consistently identified images and emotions seen on a TV monitor. Given a viewing choice, he also expressed an unwavering and stubborn preference only for Spielberg. In making his own movie, Capucine was offered props, actors and locations to select. Like any good director, he chose characters most meaningful to him — his quadriplegic companion, the fellow’s elderly mother and a Barbie doll as heroine (something of a bitch goddess, as the plot develops). Capucine accepted a director’s chair, a little cap and a megaphone through which he dominatingly squeaked his instructions of “action” and “cut”. He proved extremely temperamental, as some of the best directors are, leaving the set in a fury at times, screaming his contempt. “Capucines are able to concentrate for only three hours at a time,” the extremely polite Japanese scientist said apologetically.

Oedipe opens with an extreme close-up of a bee buzzing around a tulip. Camera pulls back and thousands of bumblebees are buzzing around thousands of tulips, all vortexing to rise like fireflies towards the Moon. A dreamlike giant gorilla stalks against a brick wall’s background, his shadow thrown like a scene from The Third Man. Barbie’s naked breasts sprout flowers, which in turn become missiles fired at our unlucky hero-monkey. The quadriplegic appears in his wheelchair, wearing a surreal mask of his own face. The man’s mother wears the same mask. At one point the videogame Donkey Kong is intercut, adapted to cartoon versions of the film’s characters chasing each other up escalators of expertise. The irresistible and deadly Barbie grows to 50ft and hangs out in the harbour. Eventually the mighty capucine hauls the wheel-chaired man out of his cradle by the scruff of his collar and flies him to the Moon.

I was off in a flash to be the first to interview this magnificent genius capucine. I found him on a leafy island, conferring with his monkey assistant director, not entirely interested in answering silly questions. As it happened, I had none. I held out my banana microphone. He ate it. We had a rare and exquisite moment of communion. I bowed to the master.