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FrançaisShadow Casters are part of the collaborative project “Between Heritage and Film – Voices of Communities”, which brings together five organizations from different regions – Teatar od soli, SU Rojc, Pulska Filmska Tvornica, Udruga 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 just physical – they carry stories, identities, and cultural practices. Film and media recordings document these processes, preserve them, and transform them into creative, shared expressions.
Through a fusion 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 recognize, document, and interpret heritage elements in and around film, all with the goal of preserving cultural heritage for future generations.
The central activity of the project is location scouting, where participants analyze films and search for real spaces within their communities that can be connected to screenplays and film aesthetics. In this way, spaces become not only backdrops but also key elements of the cinematic story, highlighting the beauty and significance of local landscapes.
Through film screenings, lectures, exhibitions, and public discussions, participants gain insight into how film interprets heritage, while hands-on workshops enable active participation – from documentation to creating their own content inspired by the local community. They learn techniques of location research, cinematic storytelling, and visual interpretation, creating authentic film stories rooted in the universal language of cinema.
This time, the program will take place on October 18 and 19 in Đakovo, organized and prepared by the associations Teatar od soli and Arla, led by Drago Cukina, Marta Džaja, and Boris Bakal.
PROGRAM IN ĐAKOVO:
VOICES OF THE COMMUNITY: BETWEEN HERITAGE AND FILM
October 18 (Saturday) – 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
City Library and Reading Room
Boris Bakal: The Different Voices of Film
Film is not just a dream machine – it is also an archive of collective memory. From the Lumière brothers and Alexandre Promio, through Fassbinder’s wounds in the city’s fabric to Ken 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 silent truths held by the community.
This lecture does not view the audience as passive spectators, but as co-authors of a lecture-performance. Film and photography become tools of participation – allowing us to discover, record, and recognize our own heritage together. Different voices of the community are transformed into different voices of film: what do spaces tell us when we look at them through the eyes of cinema? How does film preserve, expose, and invent history, identities, and everyday life, creating room for diverse community voices?
October 19 (Sunday) – 3:30 PM – 4:00 PM
Reichsmann House
Exhibition: Wells and Water
The exhibition is organized and presented by Teatar od soli. It is a documentary-artistic form that the viewer interprets and defines independently. The exhibition was created as part of the Invisible Pašman project and offers an intimate look at wells – silent guardians of fields and life, captured through a lens that merges documentation with the poetics of photographer Jan Zalović.
October 19 (Sunday) – 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM
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 profit-driven. From Cold War “children’s fairytales” and obscure soft-core classics filmed on the Adriatic, to the brutal masterpieces of Pasolini, Makavejev, Vreven, and Stojanović, film history is filled with bans, omissions, fabrications, and manipulations.
This lecture navigates through fragments of films that subtly manipulate the truth, as well as those that were suppressed, removed, locked away, or distorted – not because they were bad, but because they were dangerous. Dangerous for regimes, for religions, for markets, for the status quo.
“Film and Manipulation – Banned Films” explores the mechanisms of power that decide what we’re allowed to see, and what remains buried in archives. Beneath layers of censorship, we discover how film can be both a mirror and a trap – but also the most sophisticated machine of persuasion.
Teaser: “Art is the only proof that dreams exist – and film is the most beautiful lie. Come discover why some dreams had to be banned.”
October 19 (Sunday) – 5:45 PM
FREE FILM SCREENING: “The Peacemaker”
Reichsmann House
October 20 (Monday)
Vladimir Nazor Elementary School, Đakovo
Interactive lecture for 7th and 8th grade students and their teachers:
“Between Heritage and Film”
Program support in Đakovo:
Through the Clubture network (Ministry of Culture and Media, City of Zagreb, Kultura Nova Foundation, National Foundation for Civil Society Development + Knowledge Centers)
Support for Shadow Casters:
City of Zagreb – Office for Culture and Civil Society, National Foundation for Civil Society Development, Kultura Nova Foundation, Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)
