FIRST ZAGREB FILM SCREENING OF “VITIĆ DANCES” – KINOTEKA, April 15, 2024, at 8 PM

The film follows, for almost 15 years, the eponymous community art project by Boris Bakal and the Shadow Casters, which attempts to bring the community of co-owners together for the joint renovation of the modernist architectural masterpiece by architect Ivo Vitić using various conceptual artistic means. The film had its world premiere at the 19th ZagrebDox and has since been shown at festivals in Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Hungary, India, Sweden, and Ecuador. At the 32nd Days of Croatian Film, “Vitić Dances” was awarded a Special Mention, at the festival in Stockholm it received a Special Award for Memory Preservation and Cultural Heritage, and at the festivals in India (Ahmednagar) and Ecuador (San Antonio de Ibarra) it was named the Best Documentary Film of the festival.

Following this screening, there will be a premiere in Pula on April 30 at the Valli cinema, followed by distribution in cinemas across the Republic of Croatia. The film has already been invited to 5 more domestic and international festivals, and this is the only (for now) opportunity to see it in Zagreb.

After the screening in Zagreb, there will be a discussion with the author, led by ethnologist and cultural anthropologist Sonja Leboš.

Sonja Leboš is an ethnologist, cultural anthropologist, and Hispanist, an expert in cultural tourism and visual pedagogy. She was born in Zagreb in 1967. She works in the fields of cultural and urban studies, cultural and arts education, visual and urban anthropology, discourse analysis, and public cultural work at the intersections of narrative urbanism, design, art, and urbanism, the study of the performativity of everyday life, film, and new media. She is the founder of the Association for Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Research (UIII), which operates in the field of intermediation, connecting cultural theories and practices.

From the media: “Bakal develops a film with a skyscraper as the main character, which turns out to be part of a broader activist engagement and a renewed awareness of infrastructure serving the community; in short, it affirms all those values that in contemporary discussions are maliciously dismissed as atavisms of socialist heritage… “Vitić Dances” is the best reminder of a corrupt environment and a community violently organized on the principle of the right of the stronger. Bakal, however, transforms concrete activism, in the sense of moving to the location and developing empowering practices among the actors, into a dynamic film full of twists, documenting a period spanning about fifteen years.” Iva Rosandić, “Vitić Dances – Dance Against the System,” Dokumentarni.net, April 7, 2023.

“The theme of the film is very important because it shows not only how artists, or individuals from culture, encourage and try to achieve the protection and restoration of valuable protected cultural monuments, thus acting for the common good, for the community, but also how the system in the country, whose task it is, does not do this. It thus becomes a metaphor for many such cases, but also reveals different interests and interpersonal relationships.” Marijana Jakovljević, Glas Koncila, “Documentary from Vitić’s Skyscraper – Individual for the Community,” May 27, 2023.

“Nevertheless, the message of the film is far from dark. Above all, it is an ode to active coexistence, solidarity, community, and all those ideas that Bakal recognized in the dancing façade twenty years ago. And the documentary does not mark the end of the story – it merely rounds off one chapter – and Vitić will continue to dance.” Andrea Stanić, “Social Choreography Behind the Dancing Façade,” Kulturpunkt, May 9, 2023.

“Filmed mostly in and around the building, often at tenant meetings, lively edited – co-screenwriter (with Bakal) and editor is Martin Semenčić – frequently driven by a rapid jazz composition by the Be-Bop Dizzy Gillespie All-Stars, a dynamic film content-wise, devotedly, passionately, convincingly, but without denunciation and finger-pointing, portrays the agony of a prolonged, (overly) complicated, exhausting process that drags on due to incompetence, irresponsibility, negligence, vanity, malice… perhaps even greed. Human nature? There are honest, hardworking, and well-intentioned people, but too few to contend with the simply far more numerous, and mostly more stubborn and persistent wrongdoers for whom it is easier, isn’t it, to destroy and obstruct than to build and strive.” Janko Heidl, “Easier to Destroy than Build,” Vijenac no. 765, June 29, 2023.

“Like the architect’s wife Nada, who danced through life with her husband, Bakal dances with Vitić’s house, a paradigmatic example of Croatian modernism. His move to temporarily move into Vitić’s building, to patiently build an atmosphere of community and renewal on-site in a house that is literally falling apart, is almost surrealistically humanistic.” – Marina Pavković, economist and doctor of architecture, FB after the Šibenik premiere of the film, February 21, 2024.

Director: Boris Bakal
Screenwriters: Boris Bakal, Martin Semenčić
Cameramans: Adam Luka Turjak, Ante Cvitanović, Bojana Burnać, Bojan Haron Markičević, Boris Bakal, Damjan Nenadić, Danko Vučinović, David Oguić, Davorin Fahn, Dubravka Kurobaša, Filip Tot, Ines Lambert, Jadran Boban, Jasenko Rasol, Katarina Pejović, Lovro Cepelak, Mark Modrić, Rino Barbir, Sandra Uskoković, Plakor Kovačević, Srđan Kovačević, Veno Mušinović, Vedran Senjanović, Tamara Cesarac, Tomislav Sutlar, Tomaš Kratochvíl
Editor: Martin Semenčić
Composer: Stanko Juzbašić
Producers: Boris Bakal, Adrijana Prugovečki, Tibor Keser, Ivan Kelava
Production company: Multimedia Arts Organization Shadow Casters
Co-producers: Croatian Radiotelevision
Distribution: Radar d.o.o.
Film support: HAVC, City of Zagreb – Office for Culture, EU Media