Thursday, 1 October 2026 at 7 pm
On Thursday 1 October at 7 pm at Dokukino, the Croatian Society of Film Critics is organising a new edition of the curatorial and film programme ‘Criticism and Society’, this time devoted to the archiving and distribution of contemporary experimental film in a European context.
The programme is based on the work of two prominent European film institutes. Filmform, founded in 1950 in Stockholm, is the oldest existing Swedish organisation dedicated to the preservation, promotion and international distribution of experimental film and video art. Its catalogue connects the history of Swedish film avant-garde with recent production, with distribution remaining one of the key ways of keeping films accessible to new generations of viewers. Arsenal Filminstitut is a Berlin-based film institute that connects distribution and archiving, as well as cinemas and festivals. Since its founding in 1963, it has dealt with film history and the contemporary development of the medium, basing its work on connecting curatorial, research, educational and distribution practices.
The guests of this film-and-discourse programme are Anna-Karin Larsson, director of Filmform, and Angelika Ramlow, head of distribution with a focus on experimental film, installations and video art at the Arsenal Filminstitut in Berlin.
The film programme consists of a screening of four short films from the distribution catalogues of Filmform and Arsenal, spanning more than seven decades of experimental film practice and heritage.
From Filmform's catalogue, Peter Weiss's Studie IV/Frigörelse (1954, 8′), one of the early film studies by the German-Swedish writer, artist and director, will be screened. The fourth of Weiss's studies (of a total of five), subtitled Liberation, explores the motifs of individual liberation through a stylised, dreamlike and surrealist vision and associative editing. In a kind of dialogue with Weiss, the contemporary film essay TACENDA – Things [Better] Lett Unsaid; Matters to Be Passed Over in Silence or Not Made Public (2024, 14′) by Mehrgan Meysami will be screened. Through the fragmentation of image, text and archival material, the author explores the relationships between language, violence, history and memory, questioning the ways in which moving images participate in the creation, transmission, and, not infrequently, the erasure of history.
Arsenal's programme opens with Let There Be Whistleblowers (2005, 18′) by Ken and Flo Jacobs, a work in which the sight of a train passing through a tunnel and entering a station is transformed into an intense exploration of perception, time and movement, underpinned by the music of the cult American composer Steve Reich. The programme will conclude with the film This Desirable Device (2026, 17′) by Serbian director Mina Simendić, screened in this year's Berlinale Forum Expanded programme as well as at ZagrebDox. Using analogue film simultaneously as material, language and the subject of its own reflection, the director connects the experience of migration to Germany with the economic and political conditions of film production.
Before the screening, Anna-Karin Larsson and Angelika Ramlow will discuss the different ways in which Filmform and Arsenal select, present and distribute films. The conversation will touch upon practical and curatorial questions of experimental film distribution, the relationship between archives and contemporary production, analogue and digital formats, and cultural policies and practices (especially those related to cinema spaces), international collaboration, and the potential for institutional archives to function as active networks connecting filmmakers with institutions, curators with cinemas, galleries and festivals, and all of this, of course, with the audience.
The curator of the programme is Tibor Đurđev.
Admission is free.
This programme is held as part of the “Criticism and Society” project, organised by the Croatian Society of Film Critics.