1. How do you see short film? What does short film mean for you?

Short film was a playing field for practicing and trying out different ideas and techniques. I’m talking about the years when I used to make a short film every few days.

2. Why does short film matter? What are its greatest strengths and virtues?

I suppose its format makes it easier to get into festivals and it is more appealing to festival audiences thanks to its length, but for me as an author, thinking in terms of short film became a limitation. I have done over one hundred short films in total. After Amnesiac on the Beach (2013) and Astronaut of Featherweight (2017), which were the first films for which I had a budget to do something more demanding in terms of production, I realized I did not want to make short films and keep repeating something that did not satisfy me anymore. As soon as I got the opportunity to make a longer film, I did Unknown Energies, Unidentified Feelings (2015), which was 40 minutes long.

3. What is your favorite short film and why?

My favorite film is Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), because it is visualized as a photo-novella, it has a science-fiction romance story, it is told in easy, light way, but it also possesses depth and weight of its topic. All of this creates a micro-world with its own atmosphere within a wider cinematic universe. A Croatian film that I would recommend would be Vedran Šuvar’s Space is Not Enough.

4. Your feature animated-experimental film Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus was in the running for the Oscars, it was nominated for the Satellite Award for Best Film in the category of feature animated and mixed media international film, awarded by the International Press Academy (IPA), while the film premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. Congratulations on this amazing accomplishment! Did you ever dream of this success - how do you feel now?

Thank you. While I was working on the film I didn’t have any expectations, except that it might screen at festivals, based on the experience I had with my previous films. But, honesty, that was the last thing on my mind. When I submitted the film to Annecy, I did not know that much about the festival, or about many other festivals for that matter. I always handled that part somewhat superficially; the most interesting thing for me is to make films. When I applied for support from the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, I listed Rebus as an experimental film, because my one desire was to have the freedom to make it the way I wanted to, regardless of its narrative, technique or duration.

5. This is your first feature film and you did all the work on it yourself (directing, screenplay, animation, music and editing). When did you start preparing it? How challenging was the process and what did you enjoy the most?

I make most of my films alone so the process this time was not much different. I wrote the script in 2018 and started making the film the following year. We recorded the voices in a studio. I like working with actors even though I don’t have much experience in that regard. I am very grateful and proud to have had the chance to work with such nice people and actors. Apart from animation, that is the part I enjoyed the most.

6. You have directed numerous short films. Tell us a bit about your experience of working on short films, do you enjoy the process? How is that process different from working on a feature film?

Working on Amnesiac on the Beach and Astronaut of Featherweight, it was the first time I had a chance to work in conditions closer to fiction film. Working with actors, shooting, using scenography and costumes were all things I wanted to do. The short form suited the elliptic nature of these science-fiction narratives, but at the time I was already hoping to do a feature-length.

7. Are you working on any new projects?

I have a feature live-action-animated project ready, called All Operators Are Currently Unavailable, for which I wrote the screenplay back in 2015. Rebus was in a way created during a break after I had done Astronaut of Featherweight, where I felt I didn’t want to make another short film and a fiction feature seemed like a distant dream. For Operators, I drew the entire storyboard as precisely and clearly as possible in order to explain what it was supposed to look like.

Operators is much more traditional in its form and narrative. In terms of genre, it is an amalgam of comedy, drama and action, with elements of science-fiction, even though the whole story relies on situations that are possible, yet slightly off.

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Dalibor Barić

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