Croatian Sensations On Way to NYC

A scene from Armin, one of 21 selections in this year's Croatian Film Festival NYC (Photo: CFF NYC)

By S.T VanAirsdale

An e-mail dropped on the brain-numbing stack of shit that is my inbox reveals an interesting development on the local festival front: The first Croatian Film Festival NYC, running Sept. 13-16 at Museum of the Moving Image and Tribeca Cinemas. Featuring 21 films and a special discussion with author and critic Jurica Pavicic, this is an event I guess we should have seen coming, according to fest flacks:

Formerly part of the dissolved state of Yugoslavia, Croatia is at the crossroads of Mediterranean and Central Europe, a popular travel destination with a burgeoning art and film culture that calls to mind Berlin in the 1980s. With a growing immigrant community in New York, Croatia is front and center of the international film scene, with dozens of new artists and directors presenting their work at film festivals and independent venues around the world. This is the fourth year that the Doors Art Foundation has screened contemporary Croatian films in New York, and the 2007 Croatian Film Festival NYC hopes to draw more attention to Croatian filmmaking with the support of the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Croatian companies, organizations and individuals interested in the expansion of its cultural values.

I was under the impression that Romania had all that "front-and-center" buzz these days, but whatever. For now, we have the opening-noc love story A Wonderful Night in Split; the family drama Armin; I Love You, which is described as the story of "a young man who accidentally gets infected with AIDS" (as opposed to all of those who contract it on purpose); and the closing-night sensation, All for Free, a film about the disoriented Balkan postwar generation. Or, as they call it in Zagreb, "Mumblecroat."

The full schedule and program details are at the festival's Web site.

Posted at August 20, 2007 8:47 AM