Discoveries from Croatia World Cinema

When Mia and Sara move into their new apartment their love gets cracks and communication through post-its becomes a serious problem.

Origolab, an internationally renowned genetical engineering company, establishes a new headquarters within the walls of a small medieval town in Istria and Boris, an ambitous up and coming biologist, gets a position in it. However, he discovers a terrifying secret: whilst Origolab might be on the verge of a scientific breakthrough with discovering eternal life, they have been kidnapping local children to achieve this, putting him before a moral dilemma. Should he try to save the most recent kidnapping victim? Or will he bend under the promise of the scientific discovery of a century?

Through a series of interviews with randomly selected parents, Katarina Zrinka Matijević explores the ups and downs of parenthood in the contemporary Balkan sphere, uncovering almost as much about the couples as she does about herself.

Few brief encounters during the working night of lonely taxi driver.

Mak is an unemployed musician, while his girlfriend has just received a job promotion. After suffering a panic attack, he looks for comfort in getting drunk with an ambulance worker.

In a small town, in 2025, Krsto works for the Agency which offers to listen to people’s secrets. At one of the hearings, Krsto finds out that his client is holding a young girl captive. At the same time, the daughter of the director of a waste disposal company goes missing. Its workers have been on strike for months, with the town slowly drowning in trash. With his activist girlfriend Zora and local reporter Darko, Krsto begins to question his role of a silent witness.

Documentary about the second-oldest radio station in Croatia, established in 1942.

A young, innocent country girl comes to the big city to look for work. There she meets a charming businessman and their lives intertwine.

Slides of mountains found at Zora Film, a company that produced educational films in the 1950s. Intended to be used as visual tools during geography classes, are reanimated through various digital and analogue techniques.

A biopic centered on the life of one of the most recognizable and iconic Croatian musicians of all time, Mišo Kovač. Plot details TBA.

Everything that is alive is hungry; seed is hungry for light, bird is hungry for flight, man is hungry for the touch of another. The seed of longing grows into what feeds us.

As an actress prepares to step onto the stage, she delves deep into her subconsciousness. She begins to question her own past and reflects on her relationship with a friend, a connection that served as the foundation for the monodrama she is about to perform.

Educational silent film about tuberculosis.

Gulliver, standing still in a center of the Universe, is a sign of awe for Lilliputians who approach him slowly to start building their civilization by using his tied body as a back bone. He is still and silent while enduring the burden of negligence the Lilliputians. Until one day the ties brake.

Striking black-and-white animation traces the expansion of creatures from land, sea, and air. A film premiering at Klik Animated Film Festival.

Robert Flies, aspired to fulfill the role of a man, decides to buy his first car. That gets him into trouble.

Stigme deals with the universal subject of ideological stigmatization. The film is set in western Herzegovina, in the turbulent period after the Second World War. It talks about the devastation in a traditional environment left by ideological confrontations, which culminates during a tobacco journey. The main character of the film is Dragan, the son of an ex-Yugoslav security-intelligence organization officer Mile (who ends up in prison). Dragan is forced to go on a tobacco journey with a group of tobacco smugglers, believing that none of the smugglers know his true identity.

Goran is a middle-aged man in Zagreb attending a birthday party with his wife and daughter, but who, after a close encounter with death, is overwhelmed by a wave of existential anxiety.

The monuments of ancient Egypt dominate her desert landscape. They remind the world of fabulous power and the wealth of a civilization that flourished thousands of years before the birth of Christ. Two obsessed treasure Seekers would devote their lives to uncovering the secrets Buried deep beneath the sands. One was a circus strongman, Giovanni Belzoni, who was drawn to Egypt's mystique and developed a passion for uncovering its secrets. The other, a stellar English archaeologist, Howard Carter, who was convinced the tomb of King Tutankhamen rested in the Valley of the Kings. He and his team worked ceaselessly for seven years to locate it and in 1922 they Unearthed the elusive tomb. Journey back thousands of years with these two famous archaeologists and then unmatched passion to bring Egypt's past to life.

The film follows a rather peculiar workshop held in Zagreb for foreigners with deep pockets. The aim of the workshop is to teach participants a very basic skill – how to seduce a woman in order to get her to bed.

An exploration of the personal experience of leaving, returning to and re-shaping identity. Its structure revolves around the depiction of Neli Ružić's site-specific sculpture Before the Dawn and Bogdan Bogdanović's monument Guardian of Freedom, both of which were set around the Klis fortress in different times, left to entropy and social change. The state of these sculptures activates the archaeology of time, invisible and erased history. The intention of the work is to use the mediums of film, narration and image to evoke the entanglement of personal, autobiographical and historical situation, individual and collective memory, as well as the concept of identity as an unstable construct.

A documentary musical comedy with elements of kitchen-sink realist drama, featuring Marija's three granddaughters: Nina, Zeljka and Danira.

Defragmentation of the past. A painter, mother and child comprise a family nucleus. The loss of the mother leads to the dissolution of memory, and memories become signs, ritually trapped in infinity. The artist’s artificial space makes him clash with the surroundings.

Emir and his son Gabriel face deporatation from Croatia due to the lack of proper documentation. As the bureacratic system puts more and more pressure onto them, they decide to leave for the seaside in order to make peace with the chaotic situation they have found themselves in.

We live with films every day, and it seems nothing easier than answering the question: what is a film? Obviously, a film is, first and foremost, a document, a testimony of the world that surrounds us. The rich expressional possibilities of film are based on the imperfection of the human eye, its sluggishness, so thanks to the stroboscopic effect we can animate a still image. Film is therefore a kinetic image, or a moving image. It can make the invisible visible, bring the distant closer, enlarge the small, speed up the slow, slow down the fast, and return the end to the beginning. The technological basis of film: light, film tape, camera, projector, film screen. Expressive possibilities of film: scientific, documentary, communicative, artistic. Basic film genres: differences among films.

Nena recently started working as a school assistant to seven-year-old Dejan who has learning disabilities. It's one of the first Nena's grown-up jobs, and Dejan is a tough cookie so every day is a new challenge for the two of them. Apart from that, Nena also has to struggle with the rigid school system around them. Things look pretty bleak until one day a fluffy white friend comes to visit.

Plants such as Dracaena, Ficus, and Philodendron were integral parts of the socialist modernist architecture in the seventies and eighties. Today, they remain strong visual reminders of the socialist state. In "Currents", the movement of plants, the only remaining residents of the building, may be read as a part of a wider context, the change of currents. One paradigm of understanding space is being replaced with another one, the concept of the welfare state, and its undertakings are treated with contempt. Absurdity is a feature of this situation, in which that which was once of great importance becomes completely irrelevant.

Marina’s (40) month-long vacation is nearing its end, after which she leaves for another six months to work on a cruiser as a housekeeping supervisor. As the separation from her children is getting closer, Marina grows increasingly anxious.

The production of cultural meaning, and of value, takes on a number of associations in "Krumpira Krumpira" ("Potatoes, Potatoes"), from 2001. The film pictures the artist selling cakes - a substitute for the standard plebeian foodstuff, bread - in the middle of a deserted, snowy forest landscape.

A troubled middle-aged man spends his summer holiday with his mother.

On a remote Adriatic island, goats have roamed freely for 40 years, following a failed farming project. Now deemed a problem, armed men arrive to restore "natural balance" through a chilling cull – revealing how easily violence can be justified as the only solution.

It tells an incredible story of a professor who has shaped generations of filmmakers for over 40 years. From membership in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts to friendship with Steven Spielberg, his enviable career has been covered in numerous newspaper articles in Croatia. When he reveals to his students that he is battling leukemia, they spread the humanitarian campaign for his treatment to the public. As the line between film and reality blurs, traces of a collective and willing silence, which upheld for decades this character of the beloved professor, gradually come to light.

A reply to an earlier work – a radically digressive footnote – and the opening salvo of a new tendency. It is intensely personal and explores the relationship of storytelling to violence, to power, and to memory.

Distracted by the forest's beauties on her way to Grandma, the Little Red Riding Hood loses the food basket. Having observed this, the Wolf retrieves the basket, delivers it to Grandma and the two have a good laugh about the event.

Željko and Anita are a seemingly harmonious young couple. He works from home, she sells real estate and is often absent. Željko prepares dinner and pleasantly surprises Anita, but there is something unusual in her behavior. In the middle of dinner, Anita receives a phone call and has to go back to work.

A documentary about Edo Maajka, a hip hop star from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

In a documentary manner, "Amen" addresses the issues of violence and other moral principles of contemporary society in all of its layers.

A war veteran with post-traumatic disorders talks about his practical inability to start a normal life after his fighting and killing experience. This 35-year-old married man with three children, who joined the Croatian army in the very beginning of the war and saw various Yugoslavian battlefields from his perspective of a sniper, is unemployed today and tries to adapt to his surroundings while still feeling the closest to his former, now similarly dispossessed co-fighters.

Daisy is a magical girl, a superheroine in a city that depends on her and other girls like her to survive the daily monster attack. The pressure of millions of people depending on her and her boss's expectations weigh her down as she slowly loses herself like a flower loses its petals.

Zagreb. A family: Ana, the mother, Katarina, Tvrtko and Drazen, her three grown up children, and Tvrtko's girlfriend Natasa. The story begins in the morning when Natasa, after a quarrel with her boyfriend, comes back home, a two-bedroom apartment where her mother and brothers live. This brings a little bit of confusion in the family's everyday schedule. Through many dialogues we get acquainted with the members of the family, their personal problems and frustrations and their interesting and sometimes strained relations with no serious hard feelings, though, their biggest problem being the financial inability to move away and start living on their own.

In attempt to get rich, owner of a copy store designs a tastefully designed packaging that accompanies three bottles of wine which are to be sold to companies and business people during the upcoming Christmas time and New Year's Eve. In order to put this plan into effect, he borrows money from the owner of a recording studio, who agreed convinced that this is a great idea. However, things go wrong when they connect with an experienced con man.

Eržika, a young Hungarian woman, applies for a cleaning job in Pakrac, a small town in Croatia. However, unbenkownst to everyone, this seemingly innacuous event will set up a chain of events involving conspiratorial plots, old feuds and even a bit of romance.

In a hospital where the mundane and surreal collide, Jošt’s search for answers about his tic entangles him in a web of strange events, weaving his fate with those of patients and staff around him.

In this film, cars have legs. Maybe that is why they feel free to use the pavement as they please. There is no room, but could we perhaps be a little more considerate?

A boy obsessed with violent video games suddenly finds himself in a reality similar to the game he was playing, where his friends turn into criminals and turn against him.

The city of Rijeka is the point of transition for groups of migrants fleeing to a new life. There they live at the train station until the next trip. That is where they all meet Tinka, a young woman who is fighting for better life conditions in their makeshift residence and their safe departure. Until she leaves Rijeka herself.

The life story of Ivan Gudelj, one of the greatest Croatian football players of all time.

Mother’s Name: Orange is a poetic journey into the life of a troublesome young man who figures a chance to find himself once again in the cathartic fusion with nature. Osijek – The Sky Below is a road movie reflecting upon the wounds left by the war. In Duel, a mother and her son alternate between conflict and tenderness. Park paints a common day at a park. In I’ll Kill Ya!, the murderers of a drug dealer face the consequences of such action.

The film analyses all the things imposed on women by the media. It presents the framework within which women are supposed to act and accept it as their own – the stereotypes imposed via women's magazines and, primarily, through fashion and advertising industries. It deals with illusions presented to us by media as reality and it peeps behind the scenes. It is a film about women as shown and presented by the media. It was created in cooperation with the women's association B.a.B.e.

A 2D-animated music video for She Loves Pablo’s song Crumble.

Croatian War of Independence narrated trough the experiences of the players of the National Soccer Team who won the third place during the 1998 FIFA World Cup, in France. Their victory delivered joy to a war­torn population and it is the highest achievement of a post­Yugoslavian nation in soccer competitions.

A journalist finally gets her first big break after she gets assigned to write a story on Roko, a young man whose been recieving death threats from the representatives of the local organized crime syndicates after his brother falls in major debt with them. She publishes the story, but this only increases the threats, leading to a harrowing tragedy.

One apartment, one world where everything is formed of dusk.

On a faraway Dalmatian island in the 1920s Pogana, a woman from the inlands, is sold to be the new wife of a widow sailor with five children. When the Sailor is lost at sea, Pogana is left at the mercy of the cruel villagers and their customs.

Gracija, employee of a call centre for a healthy food restaurant, finds herself in a hotel full of eccentric and bizzare characters who question her existence, meanings of life and time and what does it even mean to be a member of society.

Film by Leona Kadijevic