On Wednesday, July 22 2015, during the 62nd Pula Film Festival, the “Vedran Šamanović” Award was presented to Dalibor Barić for the film “Unknown Energies, Unidentified Emotions”.
About the award
Established in honor of cinematographer and film director Vedran Šamanović and presented for the first time at Pula Film Festival in 2010, the “Vedran Šamanović” Award this year again goes to “an artist whose innovative approach to film, both short or feature, broadens the horizons of Croatian filmmaking”. The award is presented jointly by five associations: Film Artists' Association of Croatia, Croatian Cinematographers' Guild, Croatian Film Directors Guild, Croatian Film Critics’ Association and Croatian Film Association and according to the award regulations, all films publically screened in the period from June 30 of the previous year until July 1 of the current year are eligible for the award.
Justification
In today’s mediated world characterized by the hyper-consumption of moving images, not only through traditional channels, such as cinema and television, but also via internet video services, social networks and massive online multiplayer games, it is hard to say what a real film experiment is. What was in the 1960s and 70s considered experimentation with the classical cinematic modes of expression, can today be found in middle-of-the-road pop-star music videos, while the viewers daily consume non-linear narrative structures by watching Hollywood pop-corn hits and series produced by commercial cable networks. Therefore, what could today be considered experimental in film is the erasure of boundaries between film categories.
The inability to determine to which category Barić’s film belongs is precisely what sets it apart from other Croatian films this year. The film is a highly stylized hybrid that combines documentary, animation, live-action and experimental film. The director uses found footage as the film’s main building blocks, a practice more common in documentary essay films. He cuts out this footage, rotoscopes it and manipulates it graphically, a technique typical of animation film. All of this with the purpose of making a live-action narrative film, while the process simultaneously makes it a film experiment. In addition, it not only skews the boundaries of film categories, but also presents a generic hybrid, fusing film noir, science fiction and a detective story. The narrative takes place in a world which could be termed retro-future – the future observed from the perspective of the past (the 1960s and 70s), which brings to mind Frederic Jameson’s concept of nostalgia for the present moment, where the present is shown as past. The relationship between the main investigator Isidor Dukas and Klara, the main test subject, also contains tinges of romance and therefore functions as the relationship of the noir film hero and the femme fatale. Dukas is presented as the investigator sent by a mysterious foundation in order to make a report on their work, while his consistent investigative work of finding hidden clues belongs to the principle of detective film.
Barić’s approach to filmmaking is innovative, visually impressive and presents the future of the cinematic aesthetic in a world in which we daily create a database of shots on our mobile phones which might serve as the starting point for some future director’s film project.
Jury:
Dragan Jurak (Croatian Film Critics’ Association)
Diana Nenadić (Croatian Film Association)
Josip Žuvan (Croatian Film Directors Guild)
In Zagreb, June 15, 2015