Six Films per Year
- Series: EUROPE IN SHORTS
By Franziska Schuster. It was during the accession negotiations with the European Union in 2006 that the Croatian Ministry of Culture decided to assimilate general European film politics standards by passing a bill in support of “audiovisual activities”, which resulted in the foundation of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (Hrvatski audiovizualni centar). In 2008 this centre started its work as a national film institute and film fund, relieving the Ministry of Culture of its previous responsibility for the film industry. At the same time Croatia joined the MEDIA 2007 programme. The centre has an annual budget of around five million Euros and it’s main task, besides funding movies, is the support of the national film festivals as well as the representation of Croatian cinema abroad. The most important festivals in Croatia include the well-established Pula Film festival, which features an international programme but really has a focus on Croatian productions; the Motovun Film Festival for independent movies; the Zagreb Film Festival, which specializes in debut features; the Zagrebdox Festival; and the Animafest – World Festival of Animation.
Animation is of an especial importance to Croatian cinema, since the film critic Georges Sadoul in 1959 coined the phrase “Zagreb School of Animation”. This meant mainly the films of the »Zagreb Film« studio, which gained a lot of influence over the aesthetics of the international animation scene by featuring works like the first non-American Oscar winner SUROGAT (1962) by Dušan Vukotić or the animation series PROFESSOR BALTHAZAR (1967 to 1977). The Animafest was also founded here in 1972.
But in a sense the recording of a national film history doesn’t start until the country’s independence in 1991, since all the films from this region after World War 2 and up until 1991 are usually filed under the label of “Yugoslav cinema”. In Yugoslavia, unlike many of the socialist states, the filmmakers enjoyed a comparatively high amount of artistic freedom – a fact that was owed to president Tito’s love for cinema, his country’s nonalignment to the Warsaw Pact and the focus on television as the main medium of propaganda. The nationalistic partisan movies were popular, but it was the films of the “Black Wave” that garnered international critical acclaim. The films by Karpo Godina, Želimir Žilnik and others distinguished themselves by their critical attitude towards Socialism as well as their avantgarde aesthetics.
Growing ethnic tensions after Tito’s death in 1980 also came to the surface in the cinematic output of the time, when the “Aesthetics of Chaos” were established as a reaction against the ongoing decline of social structures leading up to the Balkan wars. Although the film fund, which was decentrally organized even before the collapse of Yugoslavia, had survived, the fighting and the following economic crisis constituted the worst conditions imaginable for Croatian film production during the 1990s. Still there were about four feature-length films produces every year, some of which found international attention. In the years of the new millennium the cinematic output has slightly risen to about six films per year. Among the most prominent Croatian directors today are Vinko Brešan, who with his films HOW THE WAR STARTED ON MY ISLAND (1996), WITNESSES (2003) and WILL NOT STOP THERE (2008) tries to process the recent history of his country, and Arsen Anton Ostojić, who with his films A WONDERFUL NIGHT IN SPLIT (2004) and NO ONE'S SON (2008) attempts to do the same; films like ARMIN (2007) by Ognjen Sviličić or BUICK RIVIERA (2008) by Goran Rušinović, on the other hand, focus more on private human interactions. The 2009 Cannes Film Festival featured two Croatian productions: the short films CIAO MAMA by Goran Odvorčić in the competition and TULUM (PARTY) by Dalibor Matanić in the section Semaine de la Critique.
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