ZFF in Rijeka, Pula, Varaždin and Čakovec

As in previous years, Zagreb Film Festival will be visiting other Croatian cities in order to present part of its program with the audience outside Zagreb. For the fifth time now, ZFF will present its program in Art-Cinema Croatia in Rijeka. ZFF has a year-round cooperation with this cinema, exchanging independent (mostly European) films. This time, the program will take place on two weekends (Sunday, 27 October and Saturday-Sunday, 2-3 November). Some fifteen films will be shown in ten screening slots. This year, we will visit the city of Varaždin for the first time. Its Cinema Galerija will host our program on 24-25 October. We will present part of this year's program there. Varaždin will thus officially become part of ZFF's regular tour across Croatia. Also we are continuing our cooperation with the Čakovec Cultural Center, where a small part of our program will be presented between 8 and 12 November. As regards Pula, local Cinema Valli will be screening the films from the last year's ZFF as part of its regular repertoire throughout October. Together with Art Cinema Croatia, Cinema Galerija, Čakovec Cultural Center and Cinema Valli, we are looking forward to visiting our old-new audience yet another time!

ZFF in Art Cinema Croatia 

For the sixth year in a row, Art Cinema Croatia has been preparing a program that spans new cinematic perspectives, forms and technologies with a reception based on two kinds of experience: Hollywood hits from commercial cinema repertoires and unlimited repertoire of downloading files at home. The expectations created through these kinds of experience could be summarized in two words: comfort and abundance. And this is what the audience expects from Art Cinema: comfort which, in practice, means everything – from snug seats to the quality of picture and sound; and abundance, referring to the program that ranges from trash to artistic experiments.

We react to these expectations with continuous improvements of the infrastructure and programming. And while comfort depends almost only on the infrastructural investments (we are trying to be up to the trends set by commercial cinemas), programming is a much more complex task that includes not just money, but also knowledge, networking and imagination.

In programming, we try to meet the audience’s expectations by opening new horizons behind which lies a priceless cinematic treasure. Numerous individuals and organizations, particularly the people who run Zagreb Film Festival, have been supporting us in this treasure hunt for years.

The ZFF’s research, its focus on young artists, exploring new territories of the art of film, high-quality mediation and promotion of programs – all this wraps films up into a vivid intellectual atmosphere. The very atmosphere we have bee trying to put across to Rijeka’s Art Cinema in the past years. ZFF is our long-time partner in the exploration of the territories where amazing cinematic creatures abide – the creatures that our audience is dying to meet again this year.

Slobodanka Mišković, Acting Director of Art-Cinema Croatia


Slobodanka Mišković, privremena ravnateljica Art-kina Croatia

ZFF in Varaždin

The ZFF is one of the best Croatian festivals and visiting it is a must. The iconic Cinema Europa and the people who run both cinema and the festival certainly deserve credit for it. It is a great honor for us to host part of the ZFF program in our Cinema Galerija in Varaždin for the first time – not as a retrospective, but simultaneously with the festival in Zagreb.

We consider it a great success for our cinema, opened less than a year ago, as well as for Varaždin, where, until recently, no modern European and independent films could be seen, which depleted the city's cultural offer. It is the very essence on which we are planning to build the program of Cinema Galerija.

Although the Varaždin audience already had an opportunity to see a few ZFF films, we hope that they will recognize the quality and pack the Cinema Galery on 24-25 October. We hope that the fact that we'll be watching ZFF films at the same time as the Zagreb audience will bring a bit of the festival atmosphere to Varaždin.

Sandra Malenica, Program Director, Cinema Galerija, Varaždin