Pulica and Dizalica Programmes at the 69th Pula Film Festival

After two years, in much stronger form, Dizalica is coming back to Ambrela

This year’s edition of Pula Film Festival presents six films in the Dizalica Programme. Once again, these are a selection of prestigious films, mostly premieres of films that received awards at international festivals. The audience at Pula Film Festival will be especially pleased that the films in the Dizalica Programme, following a two-year break due to COVID-19, are coming back to Ambrela Beach. The traditionally very popular programme at Ambrela beach is a special experience for all lovers of the seventh art.

A festival audience favourite, A Tale of Love and Desire, directed by Leyla Bouzid, is a romance drama about an intelligent and shy 18-year-old, Ahmad, a French Algerian, who meets Farah from Tunisia on his first day of literature studies at Sorbonne. He immediately falls in love, but their relationship is burdened with personal obstacles. The film premiered last year at Cannes, and won the award for best film at MedFilm Festival in Rome.

The Dominican-Argentinian co-production Carajita, directed by Silvina Schnicer and Ulises Porra, won the New Directors Award at San Sebastián International Film Festival, and tells the story of Sara and her nanny Yarissa, whose friendship goes beyond class differences and is more like a mother-daughter relationship. However, the fantasy becomes affected when Yarissa finds herself forced to deal with her past and when a rainy night and a muddy road invaded by goats trigger chaos. A Girl Returned is an Italian-Swiss co-production about the journey of a 13-year-old girl who discovers that she not only is not the daughter of the wealthy people she thought were her parents and has to learn to adapt and deal with the difficulties that are to come. The film, directed by Giuseppe Bonito, had its world premiere at Rome FilmFest, and won the David di Donatello Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Five childhood friends in the late 1990s – Jana, Marija, Mladen, Danilo and Bubi, are scattered across former Yugoslavia, but they try to maintain their friendship despite being miles apart. After the Winter, a co-production of Montenegro, Serbia, Croatia and France, directed by Ivan Bakrač, was selected for East of the West section at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival inn 2021. Momčilo Otašević stars as the lead.

Looking for Venera, directed by Norika Sefa, which won awards at Rotterdam and Trieste, as well as the award from promoting gender equality at Sarajevo Film Festival, tells the story of the quiet, taciturn teenager Venera who lives in a small town in Kosovo and years to expand her horizons, but everything changes when she meets the open-minded Dorina.

We can also look forward to the screening of the Croatian teenage drama The Outsiders, a project by Bruno Mustić and director Jelena Gavrilović in cooperation with 24 sata. The mother of 17-year-old Noah from London works as cultural attaché at the British Embassy, and every couple of years, they move to a different country. This time, Noah comes to Croatia and has to integrate into the society through typical teenage entanglements, love, friendship, and rivalry, which leads to him finally finding a place to call home. Eight episodes of this teenage series in Croatian and English will be screened in a two-hour slot.

Seeing how the love of film art is developed from early age, the most important and the longest running Croatian film festival has once again prepared four interesting films for the young ones.

The family film Beanie, directed by Slobodan Maksimović, which was screened at film festivals in Luxembourg and Zlín, tells the story of Erik, nicknamed Beanie, a nine-year-old boy who lives in a youth home because of his problematic parents. His only wish is to go home for Christmas. In a series of unpredictable events, he and his friend find themselves in the car of a thief in disguise and they embark on an extraordinary adventure. The film is intended for children over the age of 6. This Croatian co-production with Slovenia, Luxembourg and Slovakia will open the Pulilca Programme.

Mamma Moo Finds Her Way Home is a Swedish animated film intended for children over the age of 4, directed by Christian Ryltenius and Tomas Tivemark. It asks the age-old questions: is the grass greener on the other side and do we have to get lost in order to find our way home?  The two protagonists, a crow and a stork, try to answer these two questions.

To cheer up his son, Moominpappa recounts his youthful adventures – from his childhood, escape from an orphanage, to his historic meeting with the inventor Hodgkins, in the film The Exploits of Moominpappa: Adventures of a Young Moomin directed by Ira Carpelan, also for children over the age of 4. Oink, the Netherlands-Belgium animated film directed by Mascha Halberstad tells the story of 9-year-old Babs who receives a pig named Oink from her grandfather and persuades her parents to keep it if she teaches it to behave like a puppy. The film is intended for children over the age of 6, and was screened at Berlin International Festival.

All screenings in Pulica Programme are free, and the venue is theIstrian National Theatre.