"New Cruelty, New Tenderness," BITEF festival poster, 1997.

BITEF is among the oldest, most relevant, and most prestigious global theatre festivals. Since Mira Trailović and Jovan Ćirilov founded the festival in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in December 1967, it has promoted groundbreaking artistic and cultural tendencies and values. In the '80s and '90s, during the political-economic crisis, embargo, and the wars in former Yugoslavia, bad leaders, villains, and victims, BITEF brought some of the greatest names in theatre to Belgrade and promoted the highest cultural values of stage arts in the 1990s. 

In 1997, BITEF's co-founder Jovan Ćirilov commissioned Milos Ilic and Slavimir Stojanovic to create a poster to attract the younger generation, signal a new spirit of BITEF to the traditional audience, and reflect the annual theme "New cruelty, New tenderness." They thought that the worst "service" this poster could do was be pleasant and "nice" and achieve basic aestheticization. They combined loving tenderness with cruelty and highlighted possessiveness as a brutal aspect of love. The pickles stand for two similar soul mates close to each other, while the screws add an element of violence and turn love and tenderness into brutality.

The pickles allow for noise and the possibility of secondary meanings. They simultaneously stand for the 'two similar soul mates," as well as the two sour, fermented, preserved beings that may reflect the quote "pickles season," which refers to the season when nothing happens. Screws stand for connectivity, not tender, loving, and sophisticated.