Press

politics of friendship

1 – 16 May, 2016

Cinema Europa, Cinema Tuškanac, MM Center

FLORENCE HARTMANN, Spyros Sofos, Heiner Flassbeck, Rastko Močnik, Ska Keller, Gianluca Solera, Karpo Godina

The 9th edition of Subversive Festival will bring together more than a 100 intellectuals, scholars, artists, filmmakers and activists, and screen more than 50 films under the common topic the Politics of Friendship. During the fifteen festival days in May, the focus will be on new economic models, antifascist resistance, the future of the left, trade union policies and spaces of political struggle, energy poverty and food issues, green economy and decarbonizing cities in the 21st century, Stop TTIP, CETA and TISA, the relationship between church and state, the birth of the global world… The extensive film, conference and forum programs will take place in Zagreb’s Cinema Europe, Cinema Tuškanac and MM Center.

Crowdfunding - Subversive Festival

Subversive Festival doesn’t have any sponsors and is thus dependent on the City of Zagreb and Croatian Ministry of Culture’s financial support, which was severely cut this year due to the change in political paradigm. This means that the Festival’s visibility, sustainability and continuity have been put to question; however, the program will continue in its standard structure with the help of our partners such as the Center for Peace Studies (CMS), the Institute for Political Ecology (IPE), the Center for Women’s Studies (CWS), Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), the United Left (from Slovenia), the Embassy of France in Zagreb, the Embassy of Italy in Zagreb, etc.

Since our funding has been slashed, we need your help in order to deliver this year’s festival as planned. We therefore kindly ask all individuals, associations, cooperatives, initiatives, political and activist organizations to help us raise the funds we need to cover at least a portion of our planned activities.

Support Subversive Festival – the platform for promoting diversity, activism and critical thinking.

This year’s festival traditionally consists of two parts: theory and film. The first part starts on 1 May in Cinema Europe and encompasses the International Conference, Subversive Forum, Mediterranean Forum and the School of Contemporary Humanities, focusing on the relationship between the ideology of scientific and technological progress, the economy of human capital and the ethics of mercy versus the biopolitical state of “man without qualities”, i.e. the question of whether the burden of refugees and migrants from Africa, Afghanistan and the Middle East, alongside rising international terrorism, can deconstruct the EU’s unity or will produce the opposite effect – reduce the difference in opinion and turn the EU into a cosmopolitan space of freedom and democracy, despite the ideas of nation state, welfare state and the “Christian foundation of European values”. On these and many other topics will speak prominent intellectuals such as the French journalist and official spokesperson to Carla del Ponte in The Hague Florence Hartmann, German economist Heiner Flassbeck, Professor at the Centre for Middle Eastern studies at Lund University Spyros Sofos, Member of the European Parliament Ska Keller, as well as local and regional intellectuals and activists such as Dragan Markovina, Slovenian sociologist and political activist Rastko Močnik, political philosopher Gal Kirn, historian Dubravka Stojanović, Budimir Lončar

Admission to all programs within the International Conference, Subversive Forum, Mediterranean Forum and the School of Contemporary Humanities is free.

Séquence 1 07

Subversive Film Festival will open with the latest film by the great Israeli cineaste and human rights activist Avi Mograbi, Between Fences, following the movement of the ‘Theater of the Oppressed’ comprised of immigrants and asylum-seekers, through which Mograbi is trying to find an aesthetic means of political and social change. Subversive Film Festival will take place on 8 – 15 May in cinemas Europa and Tuškanac, and will screen more than 50 films. The best films will receive the WILD DREAMER award for best achievement in feature, documentary and short film competitions. This year’s festival also offers a rich off accompanying program: in collaboration with the Center for Peace Studies we present the program (Un)Decent Exposure, dealing with the role of whistleblowing in strengthening democracy. One of the guests on the accompanying public discussion will be the former spokesperson for ICTY Court in The Hague and the author of the book Whistleblowers Florence Hartmann. We also present a program devoted to documentaries by Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as The Swiss Activist Film program, whereas within the Hommage section we pay tribute three grand cineastes who left us this year: the most radical representative of the French New Wave Jacques Rivette, the Italian master of bitter comedy Ettore Scola, and the Polish genius Andrzej Żuławski, with whose farewell-work Cosmos, which he shot for 15 years (an adaptation of the novel by the greatest Polish writer of the 20th century Witold Gombrowicz), we will close the festival. Finally, one of the most prominent representatives of the Yugoslav cinematic movement “Black Wave”, Karpo Godina, will give a masterclass.

Ticket price for the screenings in Cinema Europa is 20 kn, and in Cinema Tuškanac 10 kn.

We will never give up because we deeply believe in the power of freedom and creativity in the sudden occurrence of the truth in fulfilling Badiou’s generic conditions: science, art, politics and love. Their common appearance binds us for one more step, one more word, with another gesture until the end, until the end of neoliberal barbarism, until the end of fascist society, until the demise of political Catholicism, until the end of affliction. Let’s create freedom together!

Crowdfunding campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/accounts/sign_up

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