Vladan Petkovic: How we pick films for Rab Film Festival?

This is a question we often hear from festival guests, audiences and collaborators, so we decided to tell you – as far as it is possible. Why wouldn’t it be possible, you may ask? Well, because it is not really an exact science. Rather, it’s a combination of defining the festival’s theme, prominence of the kinds of films we want to screen, their availability and visibility, our perception of Croatian and European festival scenes, and obviously, taking into account what we have learned our audience likes and considering what it is that we might want to introduce them to, challenge them, and above all, create an emotion. So on top of this all comes instinct and experience, and let’s not forget the budget: besides the obvious costs of putting up a festival, screening a film comes with a substantial price too.

When my friend Robert Zuber invited me to curate Rab Film Festival, my first question was: „What kind of a festival?“ Croatia has many film festivals that cover a multitude of genres, forms, styles and topics, so how can we stand out? Since we are both in essence journalists, and everything that came after in our careers built upon that angle, we decided on investigative cinema. But what is investigative cinema? It may seem easy to define it in terms of documentary films which often aim to uncover and examine certain topics, but even this is not so clear cut, let alone how this term would be positioned within fiction cinema. So we realised that we will, together with the audience and our colleagues at home and around the world, learn as we go. We decided to investigate what investigative cinema is, so the programme and side activities that you have the chance to experience every August in Rab is the result of this process.

We are a small, or „boutique“ festival, meaning that we show only about 25 films, and out of these, only 12 constitute the main competition programme. This means we have to pick carefully and meticulously with many criteria in mind, and since we don’t accept applications, this is a fully curated event. We follow big and small festivals in Europe, North America and Asia, we follow what is happening in Croatia and the region, and we watch many documentary and fiction films in order to make a programme that is engaging, relevant, audience-oriented but also challenging. Our main goal is to build an audience that will, as years go by, know what kind of films to expect at Rab Film Festival, but also to surprise them and inspire them to look for some different kinds of art than what they’re used to. We take into account all the different ages and walks of life that our audience comes from and try to strike a balance between entertainment, education and art.

But we do not exist in a vacuum. Other festivals in Croatia and the region will want to screen the same films as us, and we collaborate with some of them. National or regional premieres are a matter of prestige among festivals, but our aim is not to build this kind of reputation: we simply show films that fit our topic and which we believe would be interesting for audiences in Rab. Still, other festivals who want premieres sometimes prevent us from showing some films that we want, and this is another reason we position the festival at the end of August, after the biggest world festivals like IDFA, Sundance, Berlinale, Cannes, CPH:DOX, and regional ones, such as Motovun, Pula and Sarajevo. This gives us a good overview and a certain freedom in picking films, as well as feedback from audiences and critics at those festivals.

Since we don’t have a strictly established system or pattern of selection, except the widest idea of the fiction and documentary split, every edition of Rab Film Festival is an experiment that builds on previous years. This makes our work challenging but also exciting, and most importantly, it is an organic process that eventually culminates in six days of films that live and breathe today with the present audiences, but also reflect the past and inform the future. And, we believe, entertains, educates, uplifts and inspires people in Rab and visitors from outside. 

Vladan Petkovic