Vedran Šamanović Award

Inaugurated in honor of esteemed cinematographer and author Vedran Šamanović who died before his time, and awarded for the first time at Pula Film Festival in 2010, the Vedran Šamanović Award this year also goes to an artist “in any area of filmmaking, in either short or feature film, who has made the most innovative and valuable contribution to Croatian filmmaking”. According to award regulations agreed on by the five film associations-founders of the award (Film Artists' Association of Croatia, Croatian Cinematographers Guild, Croatian Film Directors Guild, Croatian Film Critics’ Association and Croatian Film Association), all Croatian films that have been publically screened from June 30 of the previous year to July 1 of the current year are eligible for the award.

After reviewing the entire Croatian film production of the previous 12 months, the three-member award committee comprised of Željko Luketić (film critic, HDFK), Katarina Zrinka Matijević Veličan (film director, DHFR) and Diana Nenadić (film critic, HFS), decided that the film PINOKIO, by author Toma Šimundža and produced by the Arts Academy in Split was the most compelling choice for the award.

Explanation

Discarding narration as a convention of fiction film is one of characteristics of the genre of experimental film however the authors who favor this film genre break away from the conventions of mainstream storytelling in different ways. The choice Toma Šimundža makes in this peculiar experiment is not unusual but it achieves fantastic results: the author challenges narration by the very attempt to film a contemporary version of the story about Collodi’s lying puppet, undermining representation and fabulation, as well as acting and directing through the agency of experimental concept.

All the while Šimundža’s Pinocchio looks as if he were made of discarded waste material: unusable footage containing unclear, contradictory or ineffective director’s acting instructions, his shouting and swearing, clumsy sequences or scenes invaded by allegedly accidental bystanders. Constant mutual misunderstandings of the main protagonists are at play – the actor playing Pinocchio and the director who can be heard behind the camera but is not seen – as well as their misconceptions about themselves and their surroundings, accompanied by messy and unintelligible visual recording as if the cinematographer/director had had no control of the camera, only to return it nonworking condition to the angry lender.

The paradoxical effect of Šimundža’s witty self-reflexive experiment is that it ultimately still preserves a semblance of a story, only it is the story of the inability of cinematic representation in which we imagine the incompetent diegetic director in ‘the film inside the film’ as the long-nosed Pinocchio and the director of Pinocchio as the playful explorer who shows us that completely incoherent film footage can be used to create a perfectly coherent film.