Beginning and development of a beautiful friendship

Film and Web

At the beginning of the 21st century, when dinosaurs used to walk the Earth and Internet Monitor was the golden standard for a web portal, some of us from Slobodna domena used to work on web projects that were related to film and cinema. There was a pioneering project of mapping of the cultural field, done through Culturenet.hr, a project by the Ministry of Culture, or there was an entrepreneurial and at the same time enthusiast idea of filmski.net which gathered a strong editorial board of then students and today releval film experts. We should also not forget projects from Croatian Film Association: Kino tuškanac and Croatian film database, and also the first website for 25fps festival. All that passed through our keyboards and helped us develop from people who just used to like watching films to people who are a bit more educated or at least more informed about the topic.

Gray-haired among us would say things were better before. During the dot.com era there was more enthusiasm and space for innovation and experiments on the Internet. Websites were made with more ambition. They were more pretentious to be original and unique. Today, the web is simplified. It was adapted to the times we live in. Similar logic could probably be applied to film as well. Things were better before, the gray-haired would say. There are no more big movements. Italian neorealism, French and Asian new wave have passed a long time ago. Nevertheless, the film moves on. Web moves on. The zeitgeist has changed. Currently we do not see the space where new big movements could form to change the paradigm. On the other hand, there is a lot going on with smart solutions which fit into a given frame. In the forest of hyper production it is still a joy to find films or websites which differ with style, sensibility or just make a lot of sense.

As for Slobodna domena, our friendship with film started a long time ago, but it still develops. Today, maybe more than ever before, we work on film related websites and apps.

Recently awarded Palme d'Or at Cannes festival to the Croatian director Nebojša Slijepčević reminded us of a simple, but in a way different feature we built for havc.hr website with whom we collaborate. At that time HAVC had a running campaign Month of Croatian film and for that we turned on something we call “the takeover”. During takeovers, the usual  homepage of Croatian Audiovisual Center is replaced by the content tailored to support the campaign. For the Month of Croatian film, the homepage was showing a list of screenings of films shown during the manifestation. When it was announced that The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is the best short film in Cannes for 2024 we had to react promptly. We had to replace the current takeover for the campaign for the Month of Croatian film with the news about the award as the main and only information, as top news. This was not a problem since this feature was previously built for HAVC. We are writing about this case because it was the exact little thing which makes the difference. When it is important, the homepage of the HAVC website can be completely visually changed to promote just a single information. This is not a typical solution for an institution of such profile, buti it has proven itself already as practical and appropriate. 

Kinoholik is a recent project of networking between independent cinemas and film related spaces in Zagreb. It is a central spot with all the information about locations and screenings. You can imagine Kinoholik as a person, somebody who knows a lot about film and has developed an addiction. The web platform itself is less important than the fact that this is the first such networking initiative on this scale in Zagreb. That’s why we have built a simple platform with potential to develop further if needed. For this project we have also developed a WhatsApp chatbot for giveaways as the first step towards a full blown smart chatbot which can advise us where, when and why to watch in cinemas. Kinoholik knows that.

While working on the website and the digital archive of Kino Club Zagreb, an institution with cult status since it has probably interacted with absolutely everyone who has anything to do with film in Zagreb, we faced a challenge that was not typical. The motivation to start the project in the first place was the project of the digitalization of the club’s archive. Since we have quite a lot of experience from working on other digital archives, like for Croatian designer’s society, Neighbourhood Muzeum Trešnjevka and Center for Documentation of Independent Culture, we did not have many dilemmas in that segment. Kino Club Zagreb wanted their web site to follow an alternative aesthetic, one that will show the character of the Club and of the works it produces. For us, this was a challenge, because after years of working on clean simplified websites all of the sudden you get the chance to work on something that is completely out of this framework. You need to jump into an unusual environment, one you do not visit every day.

The most recent film related project we worked on was the new website for ZagrebDox festival. Somehow, circles that were originally drawn at the beginning of the century have touched again. Once students from filmski.net editorial board are today producers of the festival and aftew twenty years the festival needed a new website. The old website was great and resilient to changes, but the effort to keep it running grew bigger each year. We took the task of redesigning the website by following the tradition of the old one. The deadline was short since festivals have a bad habit of starting on the date they announced. We made it on time and felt the same adrenaline festival organisers probably experience every year. The result is a more modern  website for which we hope that it will be used for a long time. A bit of salt we added, to adjust the project to the needs of the customer, was to introduce two faces to the website. The first one is during the festival, the second one during preparations for the next one. Those two faces use the same technical system but look and act differently because they talk with different audiences.