Dutch Premiere of “Vitić Dances” at the Tilburg Architecture Film Festival

“Vitić Dances” has been dancing across international festivals for the fourth consecutive year!

Since 2014, the Tilburg Architecture Film Festival (TIAFF) has presented a three-day program every March dedicated to contemporary and socio-political auteur cinema focused on architecture and spatial dynamics from around the world. This year’s edition takes place from March 19 to 21 and features around fifteen carefully selected documentary films.

The festival program highlights diverse European cinema related to architecture, “directing its gaze toward both the beauty and the discomfort of our messy, layered reality. It shows how dominant perspectives may clash, how constant change can confuse, and how design can lead to unpredictable consequences.” Through films, guest appearances by filmmakers, lectures, and debates, the festival explores these “messy realities” and reflects together with audiences on how we might relate to them.

Director Boris Bakal and composer Stanko Juzbašić, who created the music for Vitić Dances, will attend the festival in Tilburg. The film premiered at the 19th ZagrebDox in April 2023 and has since won nine awards and screened at more than 26 international festivals, including Biografilm Festival (Bologna), Lund Architecture Festival (Sweden), Cuzco Underground Cinema Festival (Peru), the History and Film Festival in Râșnov, Cine del Mar (Uruguay), Venice Architecture Film Festival, UrbanEye (Cluj), Crossing Europe (Linz), and KEK – Budapest Architecture Film Days.

We are particularly proud that this story about the dynamic and participatory restoration of the modernist masterpiece by architect Ivo Vitić is being presented to international audiences. Vitić Dances will be screened on March 21 at 7:00 PM as part of the “Messy Realities” program.

Filmed over nearly twenty years and edited over five, the film offers a highly dynamic reflection on the relationship between architecture and society through the restoration process of Vitić’s mixed-use residential and commercial complex in Zagreb. The building, restored between 2016 and 2018 as part of the community art project of the same name by Boris Bakal and Shadow Casters, represents the largest investment in the residential restoration of a cultural heritage monument in Croatia since World War II.

According to the organizers, the “Messy Realities” program questions a world different from what we thought it was — a world within an environment changing at dizzying speed. The festival considers the possibility that there is not just one reality, but many, and asks how architecture and design can create space for difference — for what deviates from the norm, what is constantly in motion, and what resists easy order and systematization.

Support for the screenings of “Vitić Dances”: Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)
Support for Shadow Casters: City of Zagreb – Office for Culture and Civil Society