Youth Industry!

The large number of cinema events regularly taking place in Croatia and abroad naturally makes one ask, "What is a film festival, actually"? What is the difference between a festival, review or week of some cinematography etc?  In our opinion, a true festival should have a firm concept that requires constant development; programs that award films; guests who can present their films to audiences communicating with them directly; educational element that will give the viewers an opportunity to learn something new if they want to. And, of course, a festival should have a platform intended for further development of film industry in general – in other words, and not to make it sound pretentious – programs and workshops that will stimulate those who are interested in writing, shooting, directing, producing and marketing their films. Having been aware of it from the beginning, we have slowly developed this, so called industry story.

Ever since the first edition of ZFF, our side program has included Palunko Scriptwriting Workshop co-organized with Croatian Film Association. Every year it results with a short film, which is then shown in Checkers, our national program. Simultaneously, and more intensely in the past few years, we organized various workshops in cooperation with Media Desk Croatia and HAVC. With our colleagues from Restart (Dokukino) we organized various masterclasses where film authors would share their experience with their younger colleagues. And all that time we were waiting for an opportunity, pondering (based on the budget) how to shape up the part of the festival that covers the above mentioned issues. Our festival is focused on the filmmakers who present their first or second films. We therefore decided to use the festival's tenth anniversary to put together all our educational activities and those aiming at boosting certain projects that will end up on silver screen one day and offer them as a package –Youth Industry! 

Youth Industry! will thus consolidate several different segments that we believe will develop even more, based on the experience we will acquire this year and in future. Thus we will have the tenth edition of Palunko Workshop, which requires no detailed introduction here. We are also launching two new projects. The first one is a workshop for children as part of our Bib for Kids program: elementary-school children will be taught the basics of filmmaking and the resulting film will be shown within this program. The second one is My First Script Workshop. It is intended for young filmmakers who have achieved success with their short fiction films and are now eager to embark on an adventure of making their feature-length debuts. Ognjen Sviličić and Srđan Koljević, two prominent filmmakers, multiply-awarded scriptwriters/directors and professors at the academies in Zagreb and Belgrade, respectively, will be conducting the workshop during the festival. They will be working on the six selected scripts of young authors whose short films have already been shown at the earlier editions of ZFF. Two of the young workshop attendants will be from Croatia and four will be from other countries. The workshop is organized in cooperation with Croatian Film Directors Guild. 

Together with a dozen other Croatian producers and directors who are preparing their first, mostly low-budget films, the attendants of this workshop will have an opportunity to learn from the experts from Film London Microwave organization how to properly prepare, produce and market a film in the making. The arrival of these acclaimed experts has been organized in cooperation with the British Council. And finally, in cooperation with Restart, we will organize more than two masterclasses: one is that of the awarded Danish film editor Niels Pagh Andersen, who will also hold lecture on "Storytelling in Documentary Film – Character Building, Identification and Movie Magic". The other masterclass will be that of Michael Glawogger, a member of this year's documentary film jury and the author whose retrospective of documentary and feature films you will be able to see during the festival. 

This new initiative seems to us like an appropriate refreshment for the tenth anniversary of Zagreb Film Festival. We hope it will also bring some results that the audience will have a chance to see at ZFF and some other film festivals.

My First Script  

Microschool International Workshop    

Screenwriters’ Workshop PALUNKO 10 

Bib for Kids Workshop 

Masterclass: Michael Glawogger  

Masterclass: Niels Pagh Andersen

Masterclass: Peter Suschitzky