70 Years of Zagreb Film: Documenting the Wilderness

THURSDAY, 30/03, 17:00
DVORANA 4

Over the course of its 70-year-long history, Zagreb Film has produced more than 1400 documentary films. In the first decades of its existence, one of Zagreb Film’s specialties were sci-fi films about nature which reached the levels of the finest global achievements. Ahead of its 70th birthday, for the first time we screen the restored copies of four short documentary films about animals. Three of them were directed by the master of the genre Branko Marjanović who, after the ban of his political satire Ciguli Miguli, found peace in the oasis of nature-themed films and acquired the status of a classic with the scientific oeuvre on mountain fauna and the Adriatic underwaters, partly as a segment of the iconic serial Mala čuda velike prirode. The fourth film is one of the finest Croatian commissioned films, Zvonimir Berković’s humorous miniature, narrated by – a rooster.

The screening will be accompanied by a Q&A with Dušan Jelić, PhD in biology, and cinematographer Sandi Novak about how to film wild animals in their habitat without jeopardising them.

FOX
Branko Marjanović, Croatia, 1964, 14'
The fox is considered one of the most cunning animals. It easily outwits its prey, even hunting dogs, but will it manage to escape the cruellest and smartest of its enemies – the man?

SUBMARINA
Branko Marjanović, Croatia, 1965, 14'
Following a group of divers, amphora hunters, the camera immerses us into the wondrous world of the Adriatic underwaters.

ST. JAMES´S SHELL
Branko Marjanović, Croatia, 1975, 15'
From a monastery in Makarska preserving an extremely valuable shell collection, we embark underwater. We study the life of the shell named after St. Jacob. It is a shell which can even jump, but sometimes it’s still not enough to escape its sworn enemy, the red comb star.

BALLAD OF A ROOSTER
Zvonimir Berković, Croatia, 1964, 12'
The rooster narrator is proud of his coexistence with the man, until it realises it is about to end up in a soup. An advertising film for the Podravka factory which, thanks to Zvonimir Berković’s imaginative script, far exceeds its commissioned form.