Special programs
In a special part of the program, this year's History Film Festival is dedicated to the connections between music and film - music documentaries, a subgenre that has become extremely popular among audiences and filmmakers in recent years. On Wednesday, September 13, the guest festival Dok'n'Ritam from Belgrade will be presented to the audience at HKD na Sušaku in Rijeka, as part of which two award-winning documentaries will be shown.
Dok'n'Ritam music documentary film festival was founded in 2016 in Belgrade. Cultural history and the influence of music are two inseparable concepts. By showing quality films, inspiring conversations with attractive guests whose attitude and style support curiosity, the desire for research and intellectual improvement, the presentation of music books and publishing, and various concerts, the Dok'n'Ritam festival provides unique atmosphere and experience to all who visit it in the Student City.
The film Rainey (dir. Miloš Tasić, 30') is an inspiring story about a young musician from Niš, Marko Rainey, who, despite his disability, managed to overcome his own fears and other people's prejudices and became a successful musician, a local star and a symbol of hope and perseverance. Dok'n'Ritam will conclude its guest appearance in Rijeka with the award-winning film by Rijeka’s own director Morana Komljenović The Last 100 (dir. Morana Komljenović, 35), which talks about the closing of the cult club "Palach" after 45 years.
On Thursday, September 14, the film Indexi (dir. Zoran Kubura, Bojan Hadžiabdić, 108'), the first documentary film about the legendary band from Sarajevo - "Indexi", who released only two studio albums in their 40-year career, will be shown in the large hall of HKD na Sušaku. At the beginning of the sixties, and especially in the seventies, their songs were an almost indispensable repertoire of radio stations in Yugoslavia and a kind of rock reading for all guys with guitars.
On Thursday, September 14 at 10 A.M. at Botel Marina, a masterclass will be held under the leadership of director Igor M. Toholj on the potential of found footage as a means of creative expression in documentary and experimental film.
This multimedia presentation will show clips from the films of Edwin Porter, Hans Richter, Bill Morrison and Gustav Deutsch, as well as two new titles: Film diaries, in which director Milica Jovičić uses old amateur recordings made in the period between the two world wars, and the film Uploaded Memories with which director Igor M. Toholj travels into the past of his own family and edits footage from a private archive with the help of artificial intelligence.
Is Rijeka a city of rock'n'roll? If you are not clear about the answer to that question, the exhibition Unfaithful Dogs and Other Stories in the Kortil Gallery is a magic pill that resolves all doubts. Best of all, it's not a placebo. It provides an introduction to the entire history of Rijeka's rock scene in one place, starting from the mid-fifties of the 20th century and following it in key moments up to today's protagonists who promise it a new future. And all this told in 20 points, that is to say in 20 chapters. It is a synthesis that we have not seen before and that is behind years of research work.
How is it possible to "squeeze" all of that into 20 exhibition posters, about seventy years of a city scene, rich as Rijeka's, with all its protagonists, genre diversity, adrenaline concert moments, record releases, tradition of meeting places and acclamation support from the audience, and to experience the story of the scene complete and rounded? And that it successfully maintains a balance between discovering the pioneering merits of the scene, recognizing the development processes that defined it, and aromatic details that raise everything to a new level? Easy, if you know that the story of rock is a story of passion. And there was never a lack of him on the city scene. The logic of that passion says: when you talk about passion, you do it in an adequate way, passionately.
The exhibition Unfaithful Dogs and Other Stories is a documentary-passionate guide through everything you wanted and what you really need to know about the Rijeka rock scene. All the more so since it is not only chronologically the first rock scene in Croatia, it is the first rock scene in the entire socialist part of the world (hint to the younger ones: Rijeka was part of that world in the 1950s), moreover, it leads the way and taking into account the events in a good part of Central European countries. It all started in the Rijeka rock club Husar in 1957, and the first exhibition poster was dedicated to it. The posters that follow put in the foreground the protagonists who opened pioneering horizons. Such are the band Uragani (the first Yu rock band), Ante Škrobonja (the spice of rock photography), Paraf (the first punk band in the socialist part of the world), the band Žele (the first hip-hop band in Croatia, and much more widely), the band Freek Tha Ho (the first female hip-hop group). Did you know that the song Toccata in re by a band from Rijeka is kept in the collection of New York's MOMA, that international temple of world modern and contemporary art? That the singer Margareta Juvan sang with the German group Inner Space, which will enter the world rock pantheon as the founder of krautrock? That we had two girl bands in Rijeka in the mid-sixties? That the scene in Rijeka, thanks to the activities of the club Palach and similar gathering places, was colored by an alternative sound, although it is completely messed up in terms of genre and it can be said that there is nothing missing in it in terms of genre? That the first electronic composition in the former state was recorded in Rijeka? That it also contains the roots of domestic jazz-rock?
The twenty posters displayed in Kortil are 20 signposts for moving through the story of the city's rock scene. Each of them invites you to travel in a certain direction and can be developed into a separate exhibition. Their informative lapidary, given by the choice of synthesis as an exhibition concept, is not their weakness, it is a plus, which can also be experienced as a pull on the sleeve to turn it into something bigger in the next exhibition steps. On a similar line is a set of about a hundred selected scenes with the signatures of photographers from Rijeka, whose work is a visual testimony of the history of the scene.
The author of the exhibition Unfaithful Dogs and Other Stories is Velid Đekić, who is also the author of two books about the Rijeka rock scene. The designer of the posters is Mladen Stipanović, whose signature bears a large number of album covers and posters of musicians from Rijeka.
The exhibition is organized as a side program of the History Film Festival, and will be open from September 5 to 22. During the exhibition in the Kortil Gallery, Bernardin Modrić's films dedicated to the Rijeka rock scene will be shown: Rhythm of the rock tribe - from Uragan to Urban, which brings a comprehensive cross-section of the scene, LP Rock - a story about Rijeka's rock veterans gathered around the LP Rock association, the renewal of old bands, friendships and love of music, and Rock bozon about the newer forces of the Rijeka rock scene, such as the band Jonathan, and the new relationships in the world of music, production, media and audience.
