July 18-August 6,2010
MMC Luka, Pula, Croatia

Cinemaniac established in 2002 as the support programme at the Pula Film Festival in order to present innovative events in art and cinema, thus creating a new social space to introduce recent achievements in the fields of experimental video and filmmaking, and multimedia installations. Within such practices, contemporary art reveals itself as both a kind of parallel history and a signpost to possible futures for avantgarde and experimental filmmaking – as well as a space where the depths of possibility are plumbed, borders argued, and the language of film image – and, crucially, new cinema forms – investigated.

The 9th Cinemaniac festival is dedicated to MAFAF – the Inter cine club Alternative Amateur and Artist Film Festival, which ran from 1965 to 1990 in Pula as an annual prelude to the Yugoslav Feature Film Festival. Two decades later, aided by available documents and archive material, we want to try and make the festival’s invisible history visible, in order to best contextualize it, reassess its real significance and rehabilitate the memory of an important event where the sheer number of applicants and their works made it the biggest event dedicated to alternative and non-professional filmmaking in Yugoslavia.

Twelve years on, Cinemaniac brought MAFAF forcefully into the 21st century by retaining a flair for researching practices in moving images, and inviting to Pula a number of the erstwhile MAFAF participants along with a new generation of visual artists. Amongst them are two artists from Slovenia, who have already participated at the previous editions of MAFAF. Marko Kovačič re-participates at the exhibition The InVisible MAFAF with his film Casus Belli (Super 8, ŠKUC, Ljubljana 1983, 15′) and Mirko Simić with his two films Passer by (VHS, BRIS & V.S. Video/Forum, Ljubljana 1990, 4′ 18”) and Positive Connection II (VHS, BRIS & V.S. Video/Forum, Ljubljana 1990, 3′ 16”).

More:
The InVisible MAFAF
Pula Film Festival

Here you can find a wide range of works showing shifts in understanding and usage of video as a media of artistic expression from its beginning in 1969 up until now. The selections include various genres from art video and video dance to music clips and documentary video.

Programs present an overview of technological, media and content shifts through time and are focused on specific topics and themes. They serve also as complementary screening programs to the lectures on video art in Slovenia that we have presented all over Europe, Asia and US…

Together with Videodokument they lead you through the story of video art in Slovenia and stimulate the usage of the SCCA video archive that is soon to be available on the net as DIVA Station.

If you are interested in the (hi)story of video art in Slovenia or you would like to offer/present it to your audience, don’t hesitate to contact us.

We wish you an exciting journey!

Videospotting Team