Voices of the Community: Between Heritage and Film (Program in Đakovo)

Shadow Casters are part of the collaborative project “Between Heritage and Film – Voices of the Community”, which brings together five organizations from different regions – Teatar od soli, SU Rojc, Pula Film Factory, Association Arla, and Shadow Casters – from the island of Pašman and the cities of Biograd, Pula, Đakovo, and Zagreb.

The project is based on exploring the relationship between space and film in shaping communities and encouraging creativity. The spaces we live in are not only physical – they carry stories, identities, and cultural practices. Film and media recordings document these processes, preserve them, and transform them into creative, collective expressions.

Through a combination of heritage, contemporary art, and cross-sector collaboration, this project becomes a platform for dialogue and exchange. Participants have the opportunity to learn how to identify, document, and interpret elements of heritage in and around film – all with the aim of preserving cultural legacy for future generations.

The program taking place in Đakovo begins on October 18 and runs until October 20, 2025. Below is the schedule of events:

October 18 (Saturday) – 10:00 AM to 12:00 PM

Location: City Library and Reading Room
Boris Bakal: Different Voices of Film

Film is not only a dream machine – it is also an archive of collective memory. From the Lumière brothers and Promio, through Fassbinder’s wounds in the city’s fabric, to Loach’s portraits of working-class communities – the camera sees more than the eye. It reveals cracks in facades, bricked-up passages, crime scenes, and the silent truths a community keeps.

This lecture does not see the audience as passive viewers, but as co-authors of a lecture-performance. Film and photography become tools of participation – to discover, record, and recognize our own heritage together. The different voices of the community become different voices of film: what do spaces tell us when we view them through cinematic eyes? How does film preserve, expose, and invent histories, identities, and everyday life, creating a space for diverse community voices?

October 19 (Sunday) – 3:30 PM to 4:00 PM

Location: Reichsmann House
Exhibition

The exhibition is organized and presented by the Teatar od soli association. It is a documentary-artistic format that each viewer defines and interprets on their own. Created as part of the Invisible Pašman project, the exhibition offers an intimate look at wells – silent guardians of fields and life – through a lens that combines documentation and poetic expression by photographer Jan Zalović.

October 19 (Sunday) – 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Location: Reichsmann House
Boris Bakal: Film and Manipulation – Banned Films

Film has always been both magic and a weapon. What seduces us with light on the screen often hides darker intentions: ideological, religious, political, or purely greedy. From Cold War “children’s fairytales” and obscure soft-porn classics filmed on the Adriatic, to the brutal masterpieces of Pasolini, Makavejev, Vreven, and Stojanović, the history of film is filled with bans, silences, fabrications, and manipulations.

This talk explores fragments of films that subtly manipulate the truth, as well as those that were suppressed, removed, shelved, or distorted – not because they were bad, but because they were dangerous. Dangerous to regimes, religions, markets, or the status quo.

Film and Manipulation – Banned Films examines the mechanisms of power that decide what we are allowed to see and what remains locked away in archives. Beneath the layers of censorship, we discover how film can be a mirror, a lure, and the most sophisticated persuasion machine.

Teaser: “Art is the only proof that dreams exist – and film is the most beautiful lie. Come find out why some dreams had to be banned.”

October 19 (Sunday) – 5:45 PM

Location: Reichsmann House
Free Film Screening: “The Peacemaker”

October 20 (Monday)

Location: Vladimir Nazor Elementary School, Đakovo
Interactive Lecture for 7th and 8th Grade Students and Their Teachers:
“BETWEEN HERITAGE AND FILM”