FESTIVALS AND EVENTS

Croatian one Minute Movie Cup, Požega ’99

The Seventh One-Minute Movie Cup in Požega showed that a great interest in this form did not weaken at all. New authors appeared, audience is getting larger and foreign response is greater.

Considering the quality of the films, one could not notice greater difference in comparison with the last year. This refers to both poetics and rhetoric that were manifested in authors’ orientation towards provocative content, either visual or auditory sensation, as well as in their efforts to find final punch lines (more often visual) that were very effective in some of the films.

If we compare this year’s films of Croatian and foreign production with the last year’s, it is noticeable that there were more socially committed films. Also, there were films that had characteristics of a mild joke, which neither wanted to offend anyone, nor did they tire anyone by asking certain questions. Films that hint at sexuality, of course, had characteristics of a joke or even caricature. There were seven such films, that is to say, every seventh film was sexually allusive.

Finally, if statistics have any importance, one should establish that protagonists of even seven films were found in animal kingdom, which does not necessarily mean that the films were of a zoological subject. It turned out that the directors of these films (intuitively?) understood that a being from animal kingdom did not confuse a viewer with a large number of connotations, that it most often »functioned« in some stereotypical sense. Therefore, in the context of a film it was easy to ascribe to them a clearly specified connotation, symbolic value or they could be a basis for making one’s point clearly — as it is the case in fables after all.

Thematic and performing diversity, that has already been mentioned, was confirmed by the first three awarded films: the Åke Kållera’s Swedish film Different Worlds, the Croatian film The Ant and the collage autobiographical film made by Tomislav Gotovac, a veteran of Croatian experimental film.

Ante Peterlić