Good fortune found me in mid-October of 2023 in Samobor, Croatia, on Zagreb’s westernmost edge, as a guest of International Sound and Film Music Festival. Dedicated to the oft-ignored creative wizards whose work connects audiences emotionally to the story, in eleven short years the festival has fashioned a singular international niche for itself while bringing to its magical 800-year-old host village a new dimension as a world art film hub. It’s a perfect match for a nation blessed with such a stunning range of musical expressions and traditions despite its relatively small size. The full story of my adventure there comes later this year on my personal channels. Here we spotlight the event writ large for its noteworthy contribution to the Cycle this winter and for the inspiration from a sister organization driven by a similar pioneering spirit to that which drives us.

The trip — my first to this part of the world — arose from my friendship with Executive Director Marijana Knezoci, which began on a bus ride from Genoa to Festival de Cannes in 2019. Our conversations over the years awakened affinities with her work, while sharpening a lifelong cultural curiosity about her homeland and region. In fact, filmmakers from Croatia (notably animators) and the Balkans have figured on the marquee since our founding, along with those from Albania and Kosovo who we seek out for the benefit of an important Bronx demographic. “The fruit drops from the tree only when it is ready,” as they say, and while it took a few years, I arrived on the crest of a wave, with the festival finally garnering accolades it has so richly earned, the small production team bursting with positive augury, and all the accompanying excitement of feeling this culture open its arms to the world.

When Marijana asked me to moderate the short film programme, I accepted without reservation. It gave me access to a full marquee of short films heavy on regional works and on Italian film, another of my lifelong love affairs, carefully chosen according with great respect for the art form. Like a greedy child in a candy shop, I brought back to the Cycle a veritable bounty of those films, and joked later with my hostess about poaching so many of her films. We both work for the advancement of this art form and its practitioners, so this was a natural development that can only signal promise for the future.

This gallery of screening room shots gives a sense of the range of films that came to us from ISFMF. We have the remarkable animated short Hope (Pero Petrušić, BOSNIA AND HERÇEGOVINA, HKUD Didak Productions), which follows a little girl through the years of World War I employing a “handmade” technique that seems to breathe life into a million daguerreotypes; Five Aunties (Sanjin Stanić, CROATIA), a music video of women in rural Croatia unburdening their spirits at the end of a hard day’s toil in the fields; the mercurial, alluring poetry of Albania’s Meri Dishnica, who screened three vastly different shorts and whose festival baby Bubbles we hope to screen soon; likewise the tender verse dramas registered as entries for Italy, Alessandro Carrieri’s But Alice Doesn’t Know All of This? in its world premiere, starring Ornella Muti, and In Plane Sight by Ben Gutteridge. Beyond the regional offering, ISFMF offered us the searing micrométrages of Tom Hartley, the astonishing tenderness of Arlette Zimmerman’s Intrusive, Bird of Paradise by Ruth Hesch and Andris Braeuer

I found myself rewarded with exactly the kind of fraternal treatment that we should be showing to each other at this moment