Fathers and Sons
Pula International Film Festival
Pula has everything that is needed to become one of the major film festivals. It has a Roman amphitheatre to show its films in – only comparable to Locarno’s Piazza Grande in size and ambiance. It has a lovely seaside on the Adriatic Sea, and, last not least, it has a long tradition: Pula, surprisingly, is one of the oldest film festivals in Europe.

Yet, Pula is not a festival that film critics fear to miss. It is not on the festival circuit, even less so than the other two Croatian film festivals, Motovun and Split. The main reasons for this lie in the history of this event.
The Pula film festival started out in the early fifties as the showcase of Yugoslavian cinema, usually graced with the presence of Tito and the rest of the Yugoslavian political elite. It was a very important event in the Eastern block, perhaps second to Karlovy Vary in significance. After the Yugoslav civil war of the early nineties, however, everything changed. Pula became part of Croatia and what used to be a grand festival of Yugoslavian film became a Croatian mini-festival. As Croatia makes very few films per year, the festival lost most of its significance. To make things worse, the nationalist Croatian regime of the mid-nineties considered the festival to be of special political importance, prompting the opponents of the regime to boycott it and creating a niche for the liberal, anti-nationalist Motovun “counter”-festival, just a couple of miles away from Pula.
All this changed recently, when, after the end of the nationalist regime, the festival founds itself in a vacuum. Without the political undertones, a showcase of Croatian cinema appeared quite insignificant, with less than ten feature films per year made in the country. The new director, Zlatko Vidackovic, made a brave move this year and transformed the event into an international film festival with two distinct aims. They still show all the Croatian films made in that year, but they have added an international program and a separate international jury judging these films.
Of course, the venue put some constraints on what films can be shown. The amphitheatre seats more than 8000 people. As at the Piazza Grande in Locarno, the festival organizers try to choose films that appeal to thousands of people and that are still valuable artistically.
In contrast with Locarno, however, where this quest for compromise between popular taste and artistic quality resulted in the dominance of films with strong political messages, in Pula, most films that were shown in the amphitheatre were addressing more private and intimate topics. Strikingly, all the films that were shown in the international competition in the arena were about father-son relationships. This was not an intentional choice on behalf of the organizers, but nonetheless, the audience saw a variation on the topic of father-son relationship, making it clear how important this specific theme is in recent films.
In Transamerica a son travels through the United States with his transsexual father, not knowing who (s)he is. The story of Jarmush’s Broken flowers is interestingly parallel to Transamerica’s in as much as it is also about a father’s journey through America but here the journey is in search of his son. But both of these films are about rapprochement between fathers and (nonexistent) sons. In contrast, both in Napola and in De Battre mon coeur s’est arêté, the father figure is the cause and perhaps also the reason of the downfall of the sons. Both of these patterns appear in the case of the two Bach sons in Mein Name ist Bach – a film that was shown in a smaller venue, like approximately half, the less mainstream ones, of the films in competition. The winning film, Benedek Fliegauf’s Dealer, for example, was among these.
The political undertones were still palpable at this year’s editions of the festival. This was the first year since the outbreak of the war when a Serbian film, Midwinter Night Dream, was shown in the amphitheatre. The director, who was present, however, was not allowed to take a bow after the end of the film, unlike the Croatioan film directors. At the award ceremony, however, the main actor of the film, who received special mention from the international jury did get on stage and received a huge applause, suggesting that the audience probably has a more mature political attitude with regards to the Serbian-Croatian conflict than those who prevented the director from going on stage. This episode as well as the general success of the films in the international competition also signals that the audience would probably be more interested in a truly international film festival than the traditional Croatian national film week. The festival organizers will have to make up their minds which route they will follow.
Felicitas Becker