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The Croatian film in the Cinema

A review of the recent Croatian feature films that have had their premiere in the cinema and on the TV screen.

The Croatian cinema-autumn 1997, will be remembered for the particularly heavy influx of Croatian films. With five cinema premieres and two television premieres, the public was presented with the tail-end of last year’s and the majority of this year’s film production, which testifies to substantial changes in Croatian film. The shift of directorial generations brought a thematic, stylistic and genre diversity. It also lessened the power of ideology and politics as an arbiter in cinema. The war cannons are quieter, but the shooting between the peacetime post-communist curtains, which are the target of the new, mostly genre based films (Mondo Bobo, A Rifle for Sleeping, Recognizing and The New Year’s Heist), is increasingly louder. And while the crime film, based in contemporary Croatia, asserts itself as the main genre, the debut film from Goran Rušinović Mondo Bobo, with its alternative mode of production, minimalist style and independent film poetry, offers itself as a prototype for a new »new« Croatian film.

Diana Nenadić