Discoveries from Croatia World Cinema

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.

Cities I Haven’t Been To is an abstract travelogue that traces the skylines of unknown metropolises, taking the viewer on a virtual journey from Dubai to Dhaka and beyond. Unlike tourist postcards, these mental images stem from the filmmaker’s own memories and prejudices, coming to life in dreamlike flashes of abstract figures.

The film follows Nives Jagodic in her research about her grandfather Dr. Joza Jagodic, doctor in Bjelovar's general hospital, who posthumously got the acknowledgment "Righteous among the Nations". Through her travels and conversation with the man whose life was saved by Dr. Joza Jagodic, we will find how much he risked throughout the whole WW2 in order to save civilians from certain death. His example will show us what makes people do something noble and righteous and even risk their own lives.

Tonka likes putting things off for tomorrow. Homework, walking the dog or putting away her toys, it really doesn’t matter, because whatever job Tonka has to do, she’ll find a way to put it off for the next day. And so, she got Tomorrowings, which attacks children who leave things for tomorrow.

This poetic documentary film presents the one day events in the Zadar County. It starts late at night, during sleep. The sounds describe the nocturnal images - agitated animal-like bodies, empty streets and the allegorical scenes of a concealed reality. The film leads into the universal presence of nature and the human sphere of the senses. The film's rhythm changes in time and shows the transition from night to late afternoon in a Mediterranean ambiance. Playing with sudden fades from night to dawn, from tension to the carefree game of a spider, to flowers, bees and sheep in the rocky ground of the Island of Pag, and respecting silence as the natural flow of the events, this film makes one aware of the richness of change in the sublime ordinariness of a single day.

Men on a Croatian island try to keep traditional fishing alive.

A Foundation reporter, Isidor Dukas comes to the Institute to make a report. For the purpose of objective reporting, the Foundation uses agents with induced, synthetic identities. In confrontation with one of the test subjects, what was supposed to be a routine control turns into a never ending maze.

In/Dividu questions the integrity and stability of things by disassembling them to basic elements and researching their origin. An experimental research of deconstruction and dislocation of matter.

A student, whose classes are losing its meaning, flees to the shore in his thoughts.

Gripping and alarming film, based on amateur footage of Vukovar. In an apocalyptic urban landscape, a sniper looks for prey.

A fourteen year old boy is his family's last hope in war torn Syria. Fearing involuntary recruitment, he tries to find luck outside of the country, eventually ending up in a Croatian refugee camp where he meets a documentarian that's willing to tell his story.

After an unconventional biomechanical system begins to experiance technical difficulties, its equally mechanical engineer opts for an unconventional solution to save the day.

Opera is an experimental film that explores perception through a filmic collage constructed with the help of a single light source. Through layered manipulation of that single source, the frame gains the rhythm of multiple sources and a play of light that transforms space and perception. This is a film about how an image can conceal reality – and what happens when it can no longer do so.

A man lives with a silent presence that never leaves him alone. He has grown used to it and is no longer afraid, but over time, the constant presence becomes harder to live with, until he can’t take it anymore.

True story about the girl who loved fairy tales.

Karla stares at the sky and imagines her view extending into a more promising future - one in which she can afford a place of her own. Window frames become portals for reflection, within which she reconstructs, through her personal archival material, relationships with those she has lived with, those she lives with now, and those she hopes to share space with in the future. This is a story about living within frames and dreaming beyond them, bounded by the cinematic frame, within which anything is possible.

In a flurry of social anxiety, entertainment and general unpredictability, we get an idea of what it is like to experience a documentary film festival, and what stays with us when it is all over.

A young criminal tries to leave the gang to protect his family and start a new life, but soon realizes that he has become part of a plan from which there is no escape.

Explores the team’s surprise silver medal win in their Olympic debut as an independent nation, challenging the legendary U.S. “Dream Team” in the gold medal game. This came amid the country’s early ’90s war of independence.

Through the figures of three women whose abusive relationships fall onto different forms of the spectrum, this docudrama aims to paint a psychologycal portrait of the abusers and their victims and the positions of both parties in Balkan society.

A naive virgin and a drug addict in the process of rehabilitation begin exploring their own sexuality, bodies and womanhood during their time in an isolated psych ward on a small island off the coast of the Adriatic Sea.

Roko Markovina, a former socialist and unionist politician from the city of Mostar in Herzegovina, reflects on the situation in Croatia and Bosnia during wartime and about the fruitless efforts that he and his wife went through to get back their home that had been taken away from them by nationalist forces who exiled them from it.

Four high school seniors, unhappy with the final test scores on their GCSEs and disfunctional homelives, decide to run away from home, stealing an old car and taking a roadtrip from Zadar to Rome, with each stop presenting an obsticle, but also a chance for self discovery.

Croatian noblemen Petar Zrinski and Fran Krsto Frankopan are unhappy with the absolutist policies of the Habsburgs, and make a secretive pact to assasinate the Austrian emperor Leopold.

After the death of her grandfather, young Eva had shut herself off from the outside world. Worried about her mental state, her parents send her away to a summer camp near the town of Krapina, one of the most famous paleoarcheological digsites in the world, where she is promptly bullied by a boy named Marko. Whilst running away from him, she accidentally stumbles across a portal that takes her 40 000 years into the past. There she befriends a young neanderthal boy named Hm, but things soon complicate when he's attacked by a member of a Homo Sapiens tribe.

This is a film about confronted parallel memories of a village that brutally changed twice its name, population and its own history. The village that got trapped in a vicious circle of never ending traumas of the 20th century.

A journey retracing my sisters’ 1992–93 displacement from Sarajevo through Bosnia and Croatia, guided by a childhood war diary.

In a marriage that is about to break up, Martin decides to reach for comfort in a third person, not knowing how his wife finds her own.

Wanting to ease the grief of his parents after his older brother passes away, a young Nikola Tesla creates The Ray of Happyness. However, an Austrian general learns of his invention and hires two idea thiefs to steal it from him and use its power to rule the Empire.

Zof is fiercely jealous, and his violent fantasies gradually turn into psychosis. When his girlfriend leaves him, he spends all his time with Lota, his Staffordshire bull terrier. After losing her too, he decides to take revenge.

Throught the usage of psychodellic imagery, cinematography and selected photographs, the director invites you into the world of a forgotten childhood long since gone.

A young director tries reconnecting with his estranged father by telling him 5 things about himself. The story is an epic cross-country odyssey leading to a confrontation 10 years in the making.

The murder of hundreds of Croatian POWs on the Ovčara farm near Vukovar is treated as a war crime and a haunting memory by both Croats and Serbs. But what really happened that night? And how was the event planned weeks before of actually being put in motion?

A documentary about the history of the Janković family, a lineage of counts that came from central Bosnia and helped to modernize the Croatian region of Slavonia during the reign of empress Maria Theresia.

Marija’s son, Luka, who disappeared during the war thirty years ago, appears on her doorstep. Luka still looks the same as the last time she saw him, when he was twenty years old. After the initial shock, Marija accepts his impossible return.

"If you can see the future, can you then change it?" Born with the ability to see the fragments of the future, Šime must piece them together to prevent a tragedy—before it’s too late.

The film image starts from forgotten family (and archival) materials. In July 1969, the Apollo 11 space mission landed at the location of Mare Tranquillitatis. Who, except lunar explorers, has the right to silence?

Short documentary on the life of the controversial Croatian art collector Ante Topić Mimara, along with an overview of some of the artworks he donated to the Yugoslav Academy of Sciences.

Jela, a little doe (female deer), comes to a bar to meet her boyfriend. He texts her that he would be late. The waiting becomes more and more tense, Jela grows more nervous and starts to lose patience. The waiter, unsure of how to react to her frustration, also feels the tension. A romantic encounter turns into a tragicomic situation.

Leaving their human hosts, mental disorders take on anthropomorphic forms and find new refuges.

Short film by Mladen Stilinovic

Three investigators of the supernatural find themselves in the lair of a force called Ghost of Prague.

Atmospheric jurney of survival through the postapocalyptic deserted world.

Antisemitic propaganda film made in NDH (Independent State of Croatia) about the exhibition held during the month of May 1942 in the Art Pavilion, Zagreb, which portrayed Jews as the biggest threat.

After signing a career contract, controversial yet successful director Michael Bruni experiences an unfortunate circumstance that will affect the new production and already strained relations with his family.

Although they live right next to Pula's biggest tourist attraction, the people of Mahala, the city's destitute neighborhood, have been forgotten by everybody.

A journey through the humanist tradition of European painting turns into an absurd tragedy of the current-day migration crisis.

An omnibus consisting of three documentary stories from Zagreb life.

Plupko, a small creature, lives in a large tree in a forest. Plupko dreams about adventure in the big world, but he has never left his tree. One day, Plupko decides for the first time to get to the ground, but it seems more difficult than he expected…

Two brothers are renovating the apartment that they have inherited from their recently deceased mother. By working together, they will finally face the traumatic past that has been troubling their relationship throughout the years.

It problematizes love relationships through the institution of marriage, asking the question of how to promise someone eternal love, if it is an emotional transformation day by day, as well as a relationship itself.

A story that follows two young people who find themselves at a bus station at 2 o'clock in the morning. The young woman Alisa is suspicious and unwilling to engage with the young man, Erik. Slowly, they start a superficial conversation, through which their memories emerge, offering us an insight into their problems.

Taking Samuel Delany’s SciFi novel Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sandas a point of departure, this experimental mid-length is at once a dance, fantasy, and a queer road film. Its protagonists, animated by the weird landscape of the Dalmatinska zagora and enraptured by the sound of the conch shell, partake in the melding tradition of Dragon Hunting. An exploration in media translation, mimicry, and the sensuous, Dragon Huntis a result of collaborative processes between fellow artist friends and different machine learning algorithms.

I wake up from a dream with an intense feeling that stays with me all morning and through the day. In the process of waking up, I recall situations, dialogues, and emotions from the dream, occasionally struggling to distinguish dreams from reality. The animated film represents one such dream that I wrote down. The dream follows a girl who possesses the ability to transform from human into an animal form, a cat. On her journey, she suffers a witch's curse and intense emotions of anger, sadness, and rage which impact her transformations.

A television documentary showing the life of Baby Lasagna, the Croatian representative at the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest.