-
New Azerbaijani Cinema
The film-discursive program New Azerbaijani Cinema opens a public dialogue on documentary work by filmmakers from Azerbaijan. It provides insights into Azerbaijani social realities and the documentary scene, with the focus on the work of the emerging director Atanur Nabiyeva. The director joined the discursive part of the program via video link. Grey Zone (2021,…
-
New Georgian Cinema
New Georgian Cinema is a thematic focus section within the Croatian Film Critics’ Association’s program Criticism and Society, designed to foreground contemporary Georgian film production, with an additional focus on documentary film and documentary approaches. Together with guests from Georgia, the program will consider the presence of Georgian films at major international film festivals, the…
-
The Non-Aligned Archive: Forgotten Intercultural Legacies in Croatia
In the light—or rather, in the shadow—of the growing threats of nuclear war, the activation of new global crisis zones, and the militarization of popular culture and public discourse, it is worth recalling that similar challenges, in different political constellations, were once met in entirely different ways. The second half of the last century was…
-
New Georgian Documentary Cinema: The Most Suitable Place
Architecture stands as a silent witness and a mirror to social policies, divisions, and colonial struggles—fortunate are the regimes under which life becomes a museum of preserved layers of the past, even those difficult to face, rather than a purgatory for all that preceded it. The territory of present-day Georgia has been occupied throughout history…
-
Politics Between Reality and Dreams
on Faraz Fesharaki’s What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov? (2024) Despite gaining instant global attention only in 2022, following the unresolved death of Jina Mahsa Amini—a young Kurdish woman previously detained by the Guidance Patrol—civil protests in Iran have been flaring up periodically since the late 1990s. After the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza…
-
Overcoming Thrownness in the World
Wishing on a Star (Péter Kerekes, 2024) Also published in Croatian here. “Most people want to find love in life” is a persuasive observation made by the astrologer Luciana, whose work centers on helping people improve their lives. Much like psychotherapy, her ability to interpret others’ confessions—particularly when paired with astrological insight—is designed to help…
-
Serene Images of Terror
Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych, 2024) Read in Croatian here. A ruin is recognizable by its incompleteness and dysfunctionality. To observe it is to reconstruct in one’s mind the reasons and steps that led to the destruction of the former structure. A ruin speaks to its observers through an absence they constantly attempt to fill—fragmentation compels them…
-
Possibilities for Saving Modernism
Czechoslovak Architecture 58-89 (Jan Zajíček, 2024) Read in Croatian here. The story of modern architecture, with a focus on the West, goes something like this: At the turn of the 20th century, there was a shift away from historicist admiration of past stylistic models and a demand for a purified form subordinated to functionality. Building…