Post-pandemic fantasies and Love’s Comeback
The eighteenth edition of the 25 FPS International Festival of Experimental Film and Video will be held from September 21 to 24, 2022 at a new location in Zagreb – the Kinoteka cinema (Kordunska 1) and on September 27 and 28 at Art Cinema in Rijeka. Six programme sections will screen 26 films from all over the world, sharing the desire to innovate and explore new possibilities of the film language.
The post-pandemic world and love’s comeback
“Two years of pandemic, lockdown and other misfortunes that hit the world made a definite breakthrough in the field of experimental film. In the pre-selection, we saw numerous works that express the present and current phenomena with codes of dystopia and sci-fi. We were even more surprised by the number of films dealing with emotions – love, romance, sexuality and erotica. These themes are not alien to the film avant-garde, but we have never seen them in such numbers. Many of them have found their place in this year’s selection, so we can say that this will be the most romantic edition of 25 FPS so far,” claim the festival selectors Marina Kožul, Mario Kozina and Tena Trstenjak.
In the selection, we will see The Demands of Ordinary Devotion, a new film by last year’s Grand Prix winner Eva Giolo, in which she dealt with the relationship between motherhood and creativity. Among the winners of previous editions, the audiovisual team of Ojoboca with Andrew Kim returns, who in Instant Life feature a new piece of celluloid speculative fiction, while Elisabeth Subrin in Maria Schneider, 1983 creates a powerful critique of the position of women in the film industry and the media through a reconstruction of the title interview.
Among the authors who will be introduced to the Zagreb audience, those who stand out are Sarah Lasley, who in How I Choose to Spend the Remainder of My Birthing Years offers a distinctive view of Dirty Dancing and the way Hollywood films shape our expectations of love, and Nicolaas Schmidt’s First Time, a Warhol-like romantic comedy which won a special mention in Locarno.
There are also three Croatian titles in the competition: To the Earthen Red by multimedia artist Nika Pećarina, followed by Null Cone by the prominent artist of the Croatian experimental scene Vladislav Knežević and Places We’ll Breathe by the award-winning author Davor Sanvincenti.
Eclecticism on the local experimental scene
Reflexes offer a more comprehensive cross-section of trends on the Croatian experimental scene. This section includes works by already established authors such as Women Minor Speculations by Nicole Hewitt and Film Factory by Silvestar Kolbas, and also represents young voices of the domestic film club, art and academic scene, who in a series of ingenious, original and charming works have shown that the avant-garde spirit in Croatian cinematography is still very much alive.
25 FPS Festival Awards
The Grand Prix of this year’s 25 FPS will be decided by a jury composed of author and editor Hrvoslava Brkušić, independent curator Marta Baradić and animator and musician Marko Meštrović. Films from the competition also compete for the Audience Award, and Croatian films in the programme have the opportunity to win the Green DCP Award, which is awarded by the 25 FPS Association for Audiovisual Research.
Admission to all screenings and events of the festival is free.
Photo: Places We'll Breathe