Pula '97

The Trends of Croatian film

Pula Festival ’97

An interpretative review of the situation in the Croatian feature film, motivated by the annual production shown at the Croatian film festival in Pula.

Pula 1997 national film festival, although scarce with high quality films, has brought a shift in the dominant trends in the Croatian cinema of the nineties. The mainstream of nineties was highly ideologized war films made by directors of the middle or the elder generation. On the side of them, within the TV film production, a »young Croatian cinema« movement started a deconstruction of the mainstream. At the festival Pula ’97, this »off-stream« had gained a mainstream position for the first time by making their first medium-budget cinema films.

That shift in dominance was not followed by the shift to the notably higher quality of production. The new generation’s mainstream films have been disappointing both for the audience and the critics: the young filmmakers were more welcomed with their early TV works. Simultaneously, the new mainstream got immediately its own counter-cinema, incarnated in Mondo Bobo by Rušinović, the black & white low-budget, independently made film, inspired by Godard and Jarmusch. Mondo Bobo even got most of the awards at the festival, what meant that the new mainstream already faces the challenge by its own »young film«.

Jurica Pavičić