Give me cinema! is a joint as well as individual response to the selling and closing off cinemas in the centre of Zagreb and other Croatian cities that a group of Croatian movie makers has made. The response was also made against conversion and commercialisation of these spaces. Similar phenomenon, at least not in these dimensions, can’t be noticed in other European countries, so we can call this a unique Croatian trend which threatens to remove an already “ghettoized” art-film, and any other that has any cultural or social value, from the heart of the city and transform it into a casual outlying entertainment.

Nostalgic about the days when going to the cinema was cultural as well as social act, and watching the movie was an aesthetic experience, this project is a kind of a protest against perceiving a movie as an easy consumable in a dehumanised boxes of multiplex cinema and erasing of the cultural memory that “old” city’s cinema had.

The point of this project is to preserve the remaining cinemas from closing down and any kind of devastation as well as turning them into state-aided repertory art-cinemas which will show Croatian movies as well, and will host festivals in bigger centres (Zagreb, Rijeka, and Split). The project has an unlimited duration and has couple of aspects ranging from public assembly, signing of a petition (www.dajmikino.org) to series of short movies. Movie project Give me cinema! Is planned as “engaged” series consisting of ten short movies (10 x 2 minutes) by ten Croatian movie makers, whose purpose is to be shown in remaining cinemas and at Croatian film festivals as a prelude to the main programme. The television screening and screening on film web portals isn’t excluded.

In its first phase, the project gathers ten movie makers, who were call upon, because they are film-lovers and regular cinema goers. They will tell their own story about cinema, about their cinema and about themselves in the cinema, or they will find some other way to answer the challenges of this negative trend.