Discoveries from Croatia World Cinema

Dominated by grief, funeral music reaches its climax in the moments of saying goodbye to the deceased. Following musicians across Croatia, the film depicts the diversity of funeral practices and the accompanying music genres.

What exactly is freedom and how do we perceive it? This film follows three seemingly different men. Tomislav, Valentin and Nenad are three friends, and what unites them is their long-term friendship, but also the fact that they have been part of an unusual secret front for twenty years.

Early in the new tourist season in the Adriatic, a family of six go to the beach in Savudrija, where their father drowned seven years ago.

Silvan Skrivanic was the last inhabitant of a remote island in the Adriatic Sea, but even the traces of his existence are gradually disappearing – whether in the memories of others or in a landscape ravaged by a harsh climate. With the fading shadows of the human soul, it is as if life itself is disappearing from the island, leaving behind only the wind, the skeletons of animals and the inscriptions on the walls that have lost their meaning for others.

A backstage look at the people and artists of the pioneering dance network Aerowaves, and their influence on contemporary dance across Europe since 1996.

A film about a cockroach who is a bad flier, but would so ambitiously want to do it better. Thanks to an amorous, compassionate firefly, he will manage to eventually fly. He lives off the dark and she lives off the light.

This film was conceived back in the eighties, just like the Slovenian band Lačni Franc's song. After numerous changes, it was completed in 1992. At the second edition of the Croatian Film Days, it won the award for Best Animated Film. Dražen Žarković, Josip Zanki, Miroslav Zubović, Magda Dulčić, Ninoslav Kunc collaborated on the film.

In a peaceful, impenetrable forest, a mother and son live harmoniously until one day a mysterious snake enters their lives and disrupts their peace. The snake transforms into a beautiful maiden and seduces the foolish son, who loses all sense for her. The mother heads into the forest in search of the forest god Stribor to plead to him for help. However, when she finally finds him, things take an unexpected turn, and the mother must gather all her courage and strength to save her son. This merry interpretation of Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić's story plays with tradition and reshapes the original tale with a dark, yet humorous twist.

This observational documentary follows different figures in their lives along the 12-km-long promenade of Opatija, Croatia.

A wise-ass Croat reporter goes to Krško, the site of the only nuclear plant built in Former Yugoslavia. It turns out that her reporting trip coincides with the plant disaster that has apocalyptic consequences.

An inquiry into the international sense of democracy. Through a set of highly stylized "tablo" frames, their spontaneous manners tell a short love story.

A fox hunter and a porcelain shopkeeper lady, the scientist brothers, a seal, a boy and a music box. Six characters in their rooms filled with traces of longing, separated by a vast and bleak landscape. Four stories on love, contemplation and (self)destruction.

Nine-year old Lina lives with her Mom after her parents’ divorce. She learns that she will be spending Christmas with Dad, while Mom is on a two-week holiday far away. However, she dreads the separation.

Animated film by Marko Tadić reflects his interest in producing imaginary, fictive narrative worlds that are exploring models of the history and future alterations. This animation is a part of the installation combining cut-outs and objects, and refers to several literary SF classics.

Documentary about the beginnings of computer development in Yugoslavia, 1970s and 80s.

The Danish soldiers in Camp Dannevirke were assigned by the United Nations to monitor the ceasefire between the Serbs and the Croats. They were only allowed to use weapons in self-defense. In the summer of 1995, the Croatian Army ceasefire broke. Once there was no longer a ceasefire to monitor, the soldiers were ordered to stay inside their camp and not interfere in the war. It was therefore up to one Danish officer, to make the crucial decision: to give orders to shoot or follow the UN mandate and not intervene.

Psychedelic realms where voyeuristic psychic vampirism and cropped images of consumerist dissociation create a haunting alternate reality.

Small, multi-ethnic community of Buje meets inside of a cinema, where everyone speaks the same language of emotions and mutual understanding.

“I had many friends before the war; many of them are dead now”, one of the narrators comments, looking at a photo of her classmates. “We had a perfect life, but we were never satisfied,” she adds laconically. The secondary school in Mostar united them, the War of Independence divided them. This mosaic of memories of the early 1990s is composed of contemporary postcards and silent shots of places where wars were once fought. Their calmness today contrasts with the emotional excerpts from the letters of the Croatian students. They describe their flight across the border, their experiences in refugee camps, and their lingering hatred of the enemies who robbed them of their home and youth.

Branimir is an anxious young man who works as a theater ticket taker. When he witnesses an act he should not have seen, he nervously starts to grind his teeth. Suddenly and bloodily, something stirs in him and Branimir frantically tries to push it back.

Three masters of football. They can perform wonders during the match and score impossible goals – but what happens in their heads when they are about to take penalty kicks?

Babajanja is a short essay documentary with horror elements. Going back to the past, the narrator is trying to find the mysterious woman he was scared of as a boy. Rummaging across his memories, dreams and forgotten horror films, he is trying to find out who she is and where she is today. He includes his family, relatives, fellow villagers in his investigation – no one is particularly keen on helping, but gathering more and more information about her, the narrator is getting closer to finally meeting her.

With the help of her daughter and a mute servant, phony psychic Madame Flora uses her clients' grief to deceive them. But one night, an uncanny encounter leads to murder and madness. Croatian National Theatre Zagreb’s production of The Medium offers enough suspense to rival any thriller in just one hour. Gian Carlo Menotti's musically eclectic English-language opera mixes Italian verismo with musical-like American modernity, as one might expect from a thoroughly American-Italian composer and man of theatre.

Documentary about homophobia and facism in Serbia. A two screen film.

This is a story about a supernatural being named Tantos who lives on a red planet called Arbor Inversus. Tantos senses that the planet Earth is in danger and decides to do everything in his power to save the inhabitants of the Earth.

A schizophrenic boy witnesses the killing of a deer in the forest and runs back home. A myriad of strange occurrences along the way worsen his condition.

Black and white hand-drawn animated music video for Glen Hansard's song, "The Closing Door."

Sometimes it is necessary to go to the other side of the world to open the topic of intimacy. Sometimes it is necessary not to shoot a single frame to make a film. Sometimes there is an attempt to create closeness by increasing the distance and sometimes the impossibility to do so tries to camouflage itself with an adventure story. Sometimes I think I speak Chinese. In this travel essay written at the height of the epidemic and just after the earthquake, I asked myself a question and intended to find an answer. Now I realize that I don’t know the answer or that it may not exist at all. Now I understand, maybe we are more similar than I think.

By using a "virtual collaboration" on the principles of delegated performance, the director uses Tom Gotovac's own performance from 2006, in which Tom completely naked "performs" himself, and then through the editing process he collages his film into previously shot scenes of the papal addressing to the people, alluding to his own, as well as Gotovac's ethical objection to the hypocrisy of an extremely influential institution. Deliberately crude editing, with a "bad feeling" that the film causes, becomes "their" conceptual artistic act which directly questions the role of the Church and its influence on the modern world of globalization, new economies, technologies and mass alienation.

An intimate story about the author's search for her brother who went missing in action during war in Croatia in 1991. In a way, the film is a follow-up of the author's grandmother whose husband was killed in World War II. For the rest of her life the grandmother was awaiting his return. The Boy Who Rushed won numerous national and international awards, including the annual Vladimir Nazor Award for Film. It was shown at more than twenty international festivals. In 2001, it was Croatian candidate for Oscar for Best Documentary Film. The Boy Who Rushed is one of the best and most awarded Croatian documentaries in the past two decades.

A video letter, created during the years of war in Croatia when communication with the rest of the world was difficult. It is addressed to the author's Hungarian and British friends. The author is sending electronic flashes with his hands, and his voice delivers the message in Hungarian and English.

Twelve 5-minute TV episodes about small Croatian towns and villages in which residents speak in strong dialects or foreign languages. The series includes episodes about Momjan, Gornja Stubica, Tounj, Vrboska, Zdala, Susak, Prezid, Bol, Susnjevica, Strigova, Blato and Lokve.

Combination of film, computer animation and video which meditatively questions the element of water as primeval philosophic beginning and the omnipresent life force. This work is an encyclopedic sample of different elements that have water as their topic. Sticking to the encyclopedic presentation, Oki ends with questions and terms in seven languages (Greek, Latin, English, German, French, Russian and Croatian) about Non-being (like the drowning man) or (the puzzling nature of) tangible objects.

“Mezostajun” is an experimental documentary film, exploring spatiotemporal relations in a Mediterranean city in which the role of city’s public spaces in people’s lives varies greatly, depending on the season of the year. Elements of summer and winter are cinematically interlaced, and create in the viewers’ perception a new existential interspace called ‘’mezostajun’’.

A living room. A place where the private space of a flat is on public display. Using memory, supposition and measurable architectural elements, the space of the living room is continuously constructed and reconstructed, and the action grows into an interpretation of past, present and possible events and relationships.

Eva and Mia are sisters. Mia is cheerful, open, has Down syndrome, doesn‘t care much about the fashion and loves people. For ten years Eva has been filming Mia and herself in order to comprehend their relationship.

The beating and subsequent death of Zagreb's high school senior student Luka Ritz in 2008 and a several-month-long search for juvenile perpetrators shocked the Croatian public and induced an unprecedented civil campaign against the escalation of youth violence. "The Cloud" is an intimate story that took place beyond the reach of all publicity: an emotional story about the traumatic loss of the only son, the best friend and the first boyfriend. The 78-minute-long documentary film that follows Luka's parents, friends and his girlfriend in their everyday struggle with anger, grief and disappointment, anxiety and memories, over the period of one year after his death. At the same time this is a story about the need and importance of civil solidarity and activism in today's society.

David never had the courage, but has always had dreams. Can he win the heart of a woman who no longer has a heart?

Structural film by Ivan Faktor examining television and media.

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

A lonely hunter caught up in the middle of a storm finds shelter at the top of a steep cliff. To his surprise, he meets a mysterious red-haired woman.

Stand-up show by Pedja Bajovic.

Short film about an invisible pebble.

Filmed on 16mm film, this visual expression is rooted in its archival materials and backed up by the poem by Hans Magnus Enzensberger. It speaks of the forgotten people, their lives and their deeds. These two Archives have been found on the flea market in Zagreb. One is of a famous architect and the other one is of a famous composer. This film ponders on this occurrence, on the vanishing of and forgetfulness of humans.

Somebody’s car is on fire. Somebody’s head got kicked in. Somebody got their mobile stolen. Will the troublesome adolescent break the vicious cycle of violence he may or may not have started himself?

This is a story about the successes of Slovenian, and, to a lesser extent, Croatian mountaineering, led by Stipe Božić, across the frozen, steepest, and most dangerous Himalayan cliffs in the world. The successes of the climbers are conveyed by important authorities in world alpinism, including New Zealander Edmund Hillary, the legendary Himalayan chronicler Elizabeth Hawley, world-renowned Italian alpinist Reinhold Messner, and British actor Brian Blessed. According to the book Alpine Warriors by Canadian writer Bernadette McDonald, the testimonies of the surviving participants are accompanied by authentic documentary film footage from the highest peaks in the world, filmed by Stipe Božić over a span of 50 years.

In a small, underdeveloped town whose only source of income is soon to be taken away by a new highway, an amateur documentary filmmaker, a guru, a British artist and the latter's mechanical chicken, decide to protest the passage's construction, believing for it to be a massive conspiracy that intends to reach an oscillator constructed by Nikola Tesla that's supposedly buried deep within the mountain.

After a local politician's daughter is abducted, two bumbling newbie detectives are sent in to solve the case, however, as the investigation continues, their collaborative efforts end up only leading them into deeper trouble.

Short horror film.

A documentary about the 1566 siege of the Hungarian city of Szigetvár by Ottoman forces who were fiercly stood up against by a small squadron of Croatian soldiers led by Nikola Šubić Zrinski, who had since remained one of the most praised figures in Croatian history.

The squirrel’s nest is well-padded for the cold winter with all kinds of stolen goods. But a sudden flood forces all the forest animals to flee to Lena's farm. The squirrel would like to help them… There’s space for everyone in a full heart!

The film "We wanted workers, we got people" tells about the exploitation of Bosnian construction workers in Slovenia.

Iva journeys from her bathroom to the inner part of the black hole, where she goes through different dimensions and changes shape, size and color in the process.

One woman on the hill with 300 dogs going through postwar healing processes creating light structures.

Amateur feature set in the Croatian Podravina region. The local custom from the title is known as "čehaljec", when people from the whole village gather in one of the households and pluck feathers.