Bonobostudio

The Arcadian atmosphere of a hazy underworld hosts unusual characters: an Illusionist, a Civil Entity, a Wooden Puppet and a silent, but dangerous Swordsman. Their mysterious and bizarre experiences are an allegory of the relationship between the now extinct tradition of European combat swordsmanship and the doctrine of pragmatic political action. Is the end of the allegory also a beginning of an instructive misunderstanding?

In a lush and lively forest lives a hedgehog. He is at once admired, respected and envied by the other animals. However, Hedgehog’s unwavering devotion to his home annoys and mystifies a quartet of insatiable beasts: a cunning fox, an angry wolf, a gluttonous bear and a muddy boar. Together, the haughty brutes march off towards Hedgehog’s home to see just what is so precious about this “castle, shiny and huge.” What they find amazes them and sparks a tense and prickly standoff.

A group of forest animals set out on the adventure of learning to write. A squirrel, a tiger, a hedgehog and an elephant will write many wrong letters and scrambled words, and in the end, learn the importance of togetherness, perseverance and knowledge.

I was one of many. I was one of everyone. And many were me. Croation animator Petra Zlonoga, who charmed us with the wonderful Dota (LIFF 2017), has created another disarmingly elegant Animator. A soulful journey of self-discovery, with a graceful and elemental spirit of creation, her new film is a twinkling, cosmological study, teeming with life and delicacy.

When did you last talk with your father? Will you ever ask him about those things that hurt you? In FATHER the reality of life is turned upside down to create an impossible dialogue - the dialogue between a child and a father that never happens.

In TESTFILM #1 they explore the creative possibilities of the Digital Cinema Package (DCP) – the new global infrastructure for film projection in cinemas. By 2015, this digital standard had completely replaced analogue film projection around the world. Could one upset the default behavior of the DCP system and unearth its artistic potential? (A practice that has been an integral part of the history of cinema.) Or is the system designed to exclude any possibility of human intervention? If so, what happens to the history and the future of experimental cinema and the renegades who refuse to play by the rules?

A young woman’s connection with the life force of nature. Using her taxidermy talents to “return” the animals to their natural habitat. But the true search for answers begins when she finds a roll of undeveloped film in each of the animals that she treats.

Cities I Haven’t Been To is an abstract travelogue that traces the skylines of unknown metropolises, taking the viewer on a virtual journey from Dubai to Dhaka and beyond. Unlike tourist postcards, these mental images stem from the filmmaker’s own memories and prejudices, coming to life in dreamlike flashes of abstract figures.

A badger is lying motionless on a local road. A police patrol approaches the body in the dark. They soon realise that the animal is not dead; the badger is dead drunk! When the police attempt to drag the creature off the road, he wakes up and things take a strange turn.

Three masters of football. They can perform wonders during the match and score impossible goals – but what happens in their heads when they are about to take penalty kicks?

In this film, cars have legs. Maybe that is why they feel free to use the pavement as they please. There is no room, but could we perhaps be a little more considerate?

Here There gives graphic form to memory’s malleable, straying lines. It begins as a traveler’s sketchbook, drawn in Croatia in the summer of 2014, but details soon fade away into abstract impressions on the edges of memory. This film is a reduction to the essence, a condensed feeling of one place and time.

If the new world ever existed, it is still hidden way behind the horizon. An analogue clock is ticking away the last seconds before world crisis, while a noble patina covers fragments for archaeologists of memory. A silent relief in between two wars; a time of diffident bodies, of melancholy leisure, of secret divisions of the world. It is 1929. Peace before an enormous explosion.

In a dead and void dystopian world, there is a place where no one exists anymore, and everyone is just their own hallucination on the verge of disappearing.

Among the garbage heaps of a big landfill on a Croatian island, Zoki uncovers a microcassette. A close study of the discarded object serves as a tribute to chance and imagination.

In a God-fearing village, giving birth to a "fačuk", an illegitimate child, is a mortal sin. In this narrow-minded, harsh, rural environment, fear grows inside the young pregnant woman who is about to give birth at any moment.

We hear the distant ring of Saturn.

Astronaut of Featherweight is a dark vision of the hypercapitalist transhuman society in which body is a commodity and money is immortality. From space spa colonies to alien plantations, everybody is forced to take care of their bodies.

Displacement – the enforced departure of people from their homes, typically because of war, persecution, or a natural disaster. This film takes a look at an absurd moment of disbelief and fear. It examines the internal processes that develop and offers a visual depiction of a moment in time of a person forced to fight for his life in a strange land – a moment of displacement.

Everything that is alive is hungry; seed is hungry for light, bird is hungry for flight, man is hungry for the touch of another. The seed of longing grows into what feeds us.