Discoveries from Croatia World Cinema

A short story of a man who, while expecting, became something unexpected.

The launch of an espionage balloon from an Italian village, located opposite the southern part of the Istrian peninsula, marked the beginning of a most unusual adventure for aviation officer Giuseppe Rosignoli. The decision to go on a reconnaissance mission over the heavily fortified Austro-Hungarian military zone of Pula was made several months before the Kingdom of Italy entered World War I in 1915.

Documentary on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary and reissue of the first album "Electro Istra" by the band Tito's Bojs.

Re-filmed 8mm home movies (Yugoslavia) and arbitrary public dialogues, both (still) self-collected and self-archived, are put in seemingly random correlations, which explore an individualized, diary-style relation to (auto)ethnographic and historic vision that doesn't aim at storytelling, but goes down to question the ontology of the image itself, as well as preconceived concepts of history, (collective) memory, archive. Other investigates found footage as experimental ethnography - the artist as archivist and the artist as (auto)ethnographer. The film is structured as a nonlinear, fluid rhizomatic system.

It is a movie about uncertainty and waiting for something big to happen.

A tapestry of Istanbul's street scenes and ornaments shot on 16mm and super8 film. A composition of everyday fragments based on found tapes, field recordings, beats and radio frequencies.

After struggling to answer the teachers question a student is sent to get a marker. Along the way he gets his answer.

A documentary about popular rock band from Zagreb Parni valjak.

Twenty years before Croatia’s EU accession, immediately before the war in former Yugoslavia, the first colony of cultural refugees from Zagreb arrived in Amsterdam. The film reconstructs the life stories of the members of the cult dark noise band SexA.

Three young girls from small city of Vinkovci formed a rock band five years ago and conquered the scene.

Politics and crime have been an integral part of Hajduk for decades. The club was destroyed over the years and served as a training ground for politicians and interest groups to realize their private, business and political interests through Hajduk. In 2008, Hajduk got a chance for a new start, but politics once again destroyed the club and brought it to the brink of bankruptcy. Torcida enters the scene. After the struggle for the Code, Torcida founded the association Our Hajduk in 2011, and the members became the foundation for a democratic and transparent Hajduk.

After more than 160 years of existence and numerous magnificent ships that sailed from its facility, the Pula shipyard "Uljanik" became a graveyard of abandoned workshops, steel wrecks and unmovable cranes. In this post-apocalypse landscape, which today is inhabited by loud seagulls, half-starved cats and crayfish, we are caught up with the emotional testimonies of former workers..

Dino Merlin's concert in Zagreb Arena.

This is a story about workers at the Uljanik shipyard in Pula whose job is to apply anti-corrosion protection to ship metal parts. Workers on this dangerous and hard job we follow in time of privatization.

This is a story about workers at the Uljanik shipyard in Pula whose job is to apply anti-corrosion protection to ship metal parts. Workers on this dangerous and hard job we follow in time of privatization.

A free association of Poe’s theme. In Poe’s work, all evil comes from and inside of a man. Marks went the opposite way. Here, the cat is the personification of evil, which provokes human aggression with its aggression. This – actually fictitious – animal causes in man hatred and the desire to kill.

Is the comfort of routine and the happiness it provides enough to keep us its slaves forever?

A ghostly lo-fi work about an apparent seance.

The religious Karla marries the love of her life, Nikola. As the celebrations advance and the first wedding night approaches, Karla becomes more and more anxious. Then she gets a very unusual idea.

In the late seventies in Rijeka, the story follows the friendship of an amateur rock band, their development, problems, love and desire for success.

In the parallel process, space and time are defined through the movement of the body and the body is inevitably transformed by the movement in time and space. Accelerated through iterative procedure, dimensions start to merge and the body falls to its astronomical existence. Zero is where time, space and body become one. (Ivor Glavaš)

A documentary about the 151-st Samobor brigade during the Croatian Civil war between 1991.1995 Using real footage and interviews.

Stinky is born from a flower in the middle of The Dark Forest. He explores it, growing in the process. When faced with the responsibility of caring for another creature, he comes to terms with the fact that there is more to the forest than just fun and whimsy.

An animated film made as a by-product of COVID during a ten-day isolation.

The breath-taking yet cold mountain landscapes of Lika shown in this poetic documentary intimate one’s state of mind, inner struggles and revelations. While Zrinka films the spectacular and cruel sights of the region, that very same Lika paints the contours of the director herself, as she revisits experiences of her ancestors and her own experiences in a search for the key for accepting her epilepsy and overcoming previous losses.

Through life each person needs to deal with certain obligations and responsibilities. While most people only feel discomfort, others experience anxiety over performing even the simplest tasks wrongly.

She loves spring-cleanings and now she feels the time has come for her to "clean up" her own life. She has a mom, a dad and a sister. And a half-sister – her father's extramarital daughter of whom she knows very little, not even if she is really her half-sister. The mother knows more about it, but she has never really discussed it with her. She has never discussed it with her father, either. The sister refuses to talk about it. And yet, she wants to find out the truth and see what happens – to her, to her mom, dad, sister and half-sister.

Rainfall life cycle.

Iris is a girl who fell in love with her own reflection and one day disappeared in the bathtub. Inspired by the Narcissus myth. This Greek hero has become the first person in the world to comprehend art and the first person to fall in love with an image rather than the reality. His is hence a story about vanity, as well as about the perception of art. The motivation of this film is to refocus on the female character, Iris, and to retell the old story from her point of view in the social media era.

Through the thick darkness of a tunnel, monotonous faint walls vibrate. In the dark distance, a ray of light suddenly blinks.

A dream come true is usually not what we thought it would be... But should we give up then?

Short sketches of feline adventures. They depict what it’s like to be a cat in modern-day society and how cats adapted to life in the 21stcentury, under a great impact of internet culture.

Fear is part of our identity, it is our everyday life and we experience it in different ways. We grow up with it, and over time we overcome or suppress it. However, it is always present, transforms itself into something else, follows our steps, and enters our dreams. It is said that fear has big eyes, they grow where we meet the unknown and then, to some aspects of reality, such as time, we give unrealistic proportions. Only when the fear is overcome, the eyes shrink and the picture becomes clearer.

As years and years go by, a tiny civilization makes its way upwards.

A man is being followed through deserted streets by an invisible figure.

The Gang of Four video from the Biennale has been a kind of holy grail for collectors for years. Fantastic quality -- despite the periodic watermarking. 1. Paralysed 2. Not Great Men 3. Return the Gift 4. What We All Want 5. Natural's Not In It 6. Damaged Goods

A unicorn wakes up and after a series of odd events finds out that he is an astral projection. He spends the rest of the day trying to get back into his body, and return home within his own mind.

A short documentary, created within Restart's "7th School of Documentary Film" 2017/2018 workshop.

Through a feminist lens, the filmmakers pay homage to their professor Marija Ujevic Galetovic - one of Croatia's most important sculptors. Marija's life story and views are told through a combination of video footage and animation of her feminine sculptures.

Ema is a first-year acting student. While grocery shopping, she encounters Jakov, an already-established young actor. Jakov offers to help her with a self-tape audition and they agree to meet at her place later that day.

The director is filming her mother's GP practice while fighting the dysfunctional health system and troublesome patients. In the end she also fights herself, trying to figure out how much more she will continue to work while young doctors keep emigrating from Croatia on daily basis. As soon as she retires, there will be no one to replace her.

Three generations of women at the hairdresser.

Two adolescents aimlessly spending their time while secretly trying to escape the grayness of the urban area.

The life in Vukovar in it's earlier days.

Programmed and limited possibilities provide the backdrop against which Lily is trying to fight for the love of her life.

With the film Good Morning Ante Babaja took one last look in the bloodthirsty jaws also known as Time – with eyes wide open. Until then he did not spare his characters death and transience, and when the time came he directed a childishly inquisitive view on his own inevitable ending. He did it with a small miniDV camera and in a matter of seconds turned from a professional filmmaker to an amateur who films not only when he can and when the conditions are favorable, but always and everywhere because he feels a need to express himself through film and think in terms of film. At the end of his five decades long career, Babaja had the modesty and the inspiration to start again. As an 80-year-old he made his first feature-length documentary film, using digital technology for the first time. Good Morning impressively and consistently rounds up the artistic and life trajectory of a great modernist and paints a unique authorial trace he left in the history of our cinema.

I was one of many. I was one of everyone. And many were me. Croation animator Petra Zlonoga, who charmed us with the wonderful Dota (LIFF 2017), has created another disarmingly elegant Animator. A soulful journey of self-discovery, with a graceful and elemental spirit of creation, her new film is a twinkling, cosmological study, teeming with life and delicacy.

For multiple generations from a small Bosnian mining town, the dark coal mine Breza is the fulfillment of professional dreams and a symbol of progress, as well as the cause of the biggest tragedy. Sakiba, an enthusiastic woman with strong opinions, stands tall among the majority male miners. She can’t get her head around division of jobs to ‘female’ and ‘male’, an opinion she has fought since she landed a miner’s job at the age of nineteen. Walking down the dark tunnels with loose safety regulations, she talks about appreciation for natural light and retirement, when she hopes to try some new mindfulness techniques her colleague reads about online. Sakiba was never welcome to drink along a male colleagues in a local bar when payday comes, but she ends up dancing to the beats of well-known Yugoslav rock band celebrating her hero.

A few cases of 8mm film stock and reversals have been found at Jakuševac, a car boot sale in Zagreb. The film was shot in the 1940s and some is in colour, which was quite rare for the time. Based on the motifs and quality, it seems there were multiple cameramen. Who are the people found on the footage made over the most dramatic years of the 20th century? Nobody at Jakuševac asks where their purchases come from, so the investigation began on the outlines of the scarce indications that the material provided...

A film that has the outer structure of the noir thriller, deals with a war crime committed in the center of the city, and actually portrays a community that will have to deal with what has been done in her name. War, night, female movie.