For many years an indispensable part of the Festival is represented by thematic exhibitions that support the art of film. In addition to the known sites of the 62nd Festival, we will present a new exhibition venue in the centre of Pula at Gallery C8.
The Pula PROfessional Industry section is aimed at film professionals and audiovisual art students. This year's programme will focus on production design. The author of the concept is award-winning Croatian art director and production designer Tanja Lacko.
Production design and the creation of new worlds, anthropology of imaginary spaces, directing space, Croatia as a “fantastic” destination, secrets of visual perception, production aspect of production design, visual effects and virtual reality – these are some of the topics covered by this year’s programme. The participants will be able to expand their knowledge through a series of interesting masterclasses by well-known European and Croatian production designers and film professionals, such as David Munns, Heizo Schulze, Uli Hanisch, Damir Gabelica, Tomislav Vujnović, Tanja Lacko and Hrvoje Hribar. The broader cinematic context of the topic will be explained by Charles McDonald, Nik Powell, Marko Rojnić and Mike Downey.
The programme will open with a production design exhibition entitled World Builders.
Apart from masterclasses, round tables, project presentations and the Young Cinephiles’ Film Criticism, this year the Pula Pro has formed a partnership with the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb and a number of universities, faculties and academies from Croatia and the region, thus enabling students to follow all the professional programmes. A platform of new partnerships with students in the region has been created so that they can exchange knowledge and experiences and have prominent film professionals reveal them “the secrets of the trade”.
General lectures
WHY DO WE MAKE FILMS? DO FILMS MATTER? Lecturer Mike Downey Archeological Museum of Istria, 21st July at 19:00
In his the inaugural lecture, prolific British film producer Mike Downey, who is in addition a member of the Artistic Board of the PFF and the Deputy Chairman of the European Film Academy, will share with us his thoughts on: Why do I make movies? I have an insatiable desire to tell stories. Do they matter? Movies touch our hearts and awaken our vision, and change the way we see things. They take us to other places, they open doors and minds. Movies are the memories of our lifetime, and we need to keep them alive.
Mike Downey, producer, and CEO of Film and Music Entertainment (F&ME), launched his independent UK production company on the Frankfurt DAX. He has produced, since then more than 50 feature films. He is a member of the Artistic Board of The Pula Film Festival also President of the Motovun Film Festival and Artistic Advisor to the Zagreb Film Festival and works closely with Amnesty International establishing Amnesty Human Rights Awards at international film festivals as well as being a consultant for USAID, the American government programme rebuilding infrastructure (film) in the Balkans
UNIT PUBLICITY AND THE TRADES Lecturer: Charles McDonald Croatian Chamber of Commerce 1, 23rd July at 12:30
Charles McDonald will talk about the essentials of PR work during production and into the post production period leading up to a film’s launch. He will touch on the following topics: developing a strategy, preparing the delivery publicity materials, dealing with press enquiries, liaison with trade publications, working with tighter and tighter shooting schedules, finding and working with a sales company, the importance of effective communication with local press during the shoot, and ensuring that the first impression of your film is as strong as possible.
Charles McDonald is one of the world’s leading PR experts. He has operated as a freelance consultant, representing clients such as Picturehouse Cinemas/Entertainment Corniche Pictures, Prix Lux/European Parliament, BBC Films, Europa Cinemas and the European Film Awards. He has given talks on Film PR at the likes of the British National Film & TV School, European Film College, Asia Europe Film Meetings, London International Film School and the Making Waves course at the Berlin Festival. He has represented films by P. Almodovar, M. Leigh, K. Loach, M. Winterbottom, D. Cronenberg, S. Coppol, W. Wenders, S. Frears and A. Arnold, ensuring their presence at festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and Venice, as well as Academy Awards, BAFTA and Golden Globe ceremonies.
TRICKS OF EUROPEAN FILM FUNDING Lecturer Nik Powell Croatian Chamber of Commerce 1, 24th July at 9:30
Nik Powell will talk about how European films are nowadays financed, how things have changed in the last 20 years, and about future financing models. He will try to explain why many filmmakers have problems making their films despite the state financial support provided all around Europe. In brief, how to get one’s ducks in a row and make a film.
Nik Powell set up Virgin Records with Richard Branson in 1970. In 1982, Powell went into partnership with Stephen Woolley, the owner of Scala Cinema. Together they formed Palace Video, followed by Palace Pictures, and then Palace Productions, soon establishing each as highly regarded entities within the UK film distribution and production industry. Powell has produced 44 films by prominent British directors such as Neil Jordan, Stephan Elliott, Shane Meadows, Terence Davis, etc. He serves as director of the National Film and Television School, chairman of the BAFTA Film committee and member of the BAFTA Board of Trustees, member of the US academy AMPAS and member of the European Producers Club. Mike Downey joined the EFA Board in 2004 and was elected deputy chairman in 2014. He was vice-chairman of the GEECT Board from 2004 to 2014 and director of the board of the Northern Ireland Film and TV Commission and Chairman of its Film Investment Fund Committee from 2003 to 2007.
UNDERSTANDING CINEMA: THE SCIENCE OF FILM PERCEPTION Lecturer Marko Rojnić Croatian Chamber of Commerce 1, 24th July at 10:30
In this lecture I’ll first give an outline of the most famous psychological interpretations in film studies before the advent of cognitivism, and will then focus on an overview of contemporary scientific research which demonstrates how viewers process moving pictures, what they attend to, and especially why viewers perceive continuity despite discontinuity. In other words, I’ll present relatively new, yet very propulsive discipline - psychology of film - and will try to show that using the methods of empirical psychology and cognitive neuroscience can advance our understanding of film and moving images, as well as that scientific investigation of film can improve our understanding of the human brain and mental processes.
Marko Rojnić (Pula, 1978). Has a BA/MA in psychology from the University of Rijeka, and an MSc in cognitive psychology from the University of Ljubljana. During his film studies at the Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, he went to the University of Kent in Canterbury, where he got his MA in film studies. He currently teaches at the Academy of Dramatic Arts, University of Zagreb, and is preparing his PhD on the intersection between psychology and film studies.
Pula Cinemateque
RESCUING CROATIAN FILM Written and selected by Rajko Grlić
Do you remember Fellini's Roma? In the film there is a sequence in which cameras, followed by reflectors, enter underground halls decorated with frescoes. Faced with the light, the frescoes begin to fade and disappear before our eyes forever.
Entering the history of Croatian film increasingly reminds of this sequence. Our film past literally disappears before our eyes and very little, recently almost nothing, is being done to stop this filmocide. And this is what this sounds like in figures: out of some 400 feature films made in Croatia there have been made renewed film copies of about a hundred of them, on materials of a relatively short duration. Only 24 films have been digitally restored, which for now means that they have been rescued from decay. These disappointing numbers only refer to feature films. In terms of documentary and animated films the ratio between the existing film stock and the preserved films is even more devastating. To make it even worse, in the last two years there has not been a single film digitally restored. Moreover, the Croatian State Archives (comprising Croatian Film Archives / Croatian Cinemateque, one of the departments of which this is a primary task and purpose) has not applied for either protection and restoration or film heritage digitalization funding of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre for the year 2015.
It seems as if nobody cares about what has been created by many generations. Nobody cares about one of the key, if not the strongest, sources of information on how people used to live, what they dreamed about and what they went through. Every film, the best and the worst, feature and documentary alike, is a document of its time. Without them one could not imagine any serious archaeology of everyday life in this region. It is not only art work that disappears with these films. The reality captured on camera disappears along with them as well. And when real history vanishes, then its redesign and erasure take place, manipulations that we increasingly witness. That is why I do not perceive this only as a disgrace of the Croatian cultural policy but as a much more painful image that fits into an increasingly stronger attempt to achieve general uniformity of opinions, into this one-dimensional manner in which history is treated, aiming to control the present and to impose the future.
But let me get back to where I started and the reason I am writing all of this. Asked once again to come up with this year’s Cinemateque programme of the Pula Film Festival, I decided to present five films from the list of the 24 digitally restored feature films. Five films that were lucky enough to have someone ensure their survival. I selected them so that the Pula Film Festival, as a national film festival, could send out a cry for help, one big S.O.S. to Croatian people, not to say culture. This is why this programme primarily cries: Folks, our films are disappearing. We are losing trace of ourselves. Let’s rescue films so that those who come after us know what we were like and what we did.
PFF realizes a series of exhibitions in collaboration with various Pula and Croatian associations, institutions and organizations, at venues throughout Pula
