Marija ratković - Hrvatski filmski savez

SELEKCIJSKA KOMISIJA
36
the jury see them among a multitude
of others and do not have a
lot of time to assess them.
The experience of seeing and
evaluating the films this year was
drastically different from the last
year when I had the opportunity
and honour to do it for the first
time. From the start I was strict,
critical and suspicious and I noticed
and followed the improvement
or decline of certain authors
and clubs. What I kept
wondering while I watched about
300 entered films sometimes
made me worry, but perhaps we
will find out the answer to those
questions some day. How come
that some of the “smaller” clubs,
which last year after workshops
produced 4 or 5 excellent films,
this year did not enter a single
film or a single good one? Is it
possible that after setting the bar
so high, nobody made any films
for a whole year? If these people
have moved on and outgrown
high school film, where are their
successors?
How to stop mentors who
have too much influence on the
film and how to control this in
the first place? Some mentors
appear as cinematographers on
the films’ credits, which is fair to
an extent, but can a film based on
the steady hand of the mentor as
cinematographer even be called
a high school film? What about
mentors who are often editors of
these films? What about the films
in which this influence is not visible
in the credits but is found out
only much later? What to make
of mentors who enter their own
film as high school film and maybe
even receive awards for it?
What is a short documentary
film and how long should it take
to make it? This year there are
different versions of it, both good
and bad, but the main problem is
that there are really few documentaries.
What has happened
to the great animators from children’s
festivals? Where are those
once talented primary school
kids? Why do they stop making
films? Where are the last year's
excellent documentary filmmakers
from Vukovar and the hi-tech
kids from Istria? Where are those
from whom we expected to see
progress in the last year but who
did not enter any films?
We have also seen many shots
with poor sharpness – it means
the young filmmakers have
switched to manual shooting but
they have not quite mastered
it yet… We have seen blocks of
workshop films shot in front of
the same house with actors wearing
the same T-shirts… We have
seen very immature films and
overly serious films, films at the
level of a joke and one day worth
of shooting and we have seen
the films which make all of this
worth the while. So - enjoy it!