Presenting the Croatian Competition & the ESFN panel
This year's Reflexes, competition program of Croatian experimental cinema, comprises eight films, and there will be a panel organized as part of the European Short Film Network's program, titled Beyond the Festival Circuit: Pathways for the Circulation of Short Films.
As part of this year's 25 FPS Festival, the Croatian Film Competition program, Reflexes, will present eight films – some have already made their mark on the festival circuit, some just starting their festival life. What unites all of the selected films is the resoluteness to defy audiovisual and narrative conventions and bold openness to explore their own means of expression. The films will screen in two program blocks, accompanied by Q&A sessions with the filmmakers, on Tuesday, September 22 at 6 pm and Saturday, September 26 at 4 pm, at Kinoteka Cinema.
Igor Zelić's Opera is a film of maximalist meaning achieved through minimalist means; his Oberhausen Film Festival Festival winning film introduces us into a range of formalist experiments in the first program, using a single light source to its full expressive potential. Innovator Ivan Marušić Klif brings his confessional I Could Have Talked, but I Decided to Type, a new type of experiment between linguistics and technology. Filmmaker Neža Knez will present The Same Sweat is Still Flowing Through the Same Pores, a culmination of many years of research into a specific location tied to her family history. The block will close with Lada Franulović's brutalist punk fantasy, VSL-246.
The same block will also feature the out-of-competition premiere of Ana Buljan's new film, En el medio, si viene, produced by the Association 25 FPS.
The second programme opens with a poetic journey through "personal imagery and broken poetry" — Ivа Kraljević's Leave This Room Buried. Damir Čučić's new abstract film, Jabberwocky, imitates the structure of the nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, constructing a self-portrait through the portrayal of his own children. Nela Gluhak, a master of concision, presents 11:1-9, where she grapples with the challenges of communication in today's world. Closing the programme is Tomislav Šoban's Abandoned Gardens, a delicate time-lapse portrait of rarely seen nature and empty spaces.
Alternative spaces for exhibition of short films
As part of the European Short Film Network's broader international program Film Festivals and Their New Realities, the Festival has organized a panel titled Pathways for the Circulation of Short Films., sheduled for Friday, September 25, at 12 pm at Studio-Gallery Klet. It will gather a number of film and festival professionals for a discussion on the screening possibilities for shorts film in alternative spaces, the visibility and accessibility of short films within today's media landscape. The panel will feature producer Vanja Andrijević (Bonobostudio); head of film programming at the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna Jurij Meden; artistic director of the Go Short Festival, Mathieu Janssen; and head of the Forum Expanded program at the Berlinale, Ulrich Ziemons.