History
When it was established, it was known as the Festival of Yugoslav Film, and it quickly became the most important national film festival in SFR Yugoslavia. Over the following decades the festival gained considerable recognition internationally, along with the Yugoslav film industry which continued to thrive since the 1960s. Many film production companies were soon founded across the former Yugoslavia and the industry released about 20 new feature films for nationwide distribution every year. These films competed for a number of awards at the festival, since the award categories and the festival concept were modeled after the Academy Awards. However, the festival often served as a launching pad for new films before being released in cinemas nationwide, so - unlike the Academy Awards - the festival usually marked the beginning of a new season for filmgoers, not its ending.
In 1991 the festival was cancelled because of the outbreak of the war and the related breakup of Yugoslavia. In 1992 the festival was restarted, but it was renamed Filmski festival u Puli (eng: Pula Film Festival). The 1992 edition was also the first one that was dedicated solely to Croatian films, since the unified Yugoslav film industry disappeared along with the former country.
In 1995 it was renamed again and called Festival hrvatskog filma (eng: Croatian Film Festival) to emphasize its now exclusively Croatian character. However, since the Croatian film industry proved to be insufficiently productive, with only a handful of new titles being released each year, the festival's popularity rapidly plummeted. In order to rectify this, the festival opened for foreign films for the first time in its history in 2001, and was renamed once again to Festival hrvatskog i europskog filma (eng: Croatian and European Film Festival). From then on, apart from screenings of Croatian films, the festival also regularly offers an international program, as well as various one-off theme programs and retrospectives.
Read more about this topic: Pula Film Festival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“I assure you that in our next class we will concern ourselves solely with the history of Egypt, and not with the more lurid and non-curricular subject of living mummies.”
—Griffin Jay, and Reginald LeBorg. Prof. Norman (Frank Reicher)