The InVisible MAFAF

A Look from Belgrade
* dedicated to MAFAF Inter cine club Amateur and Auteur Film Festival

(1965 – 1990, Pula ex Yugoslavia)
 
Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade

November 1 – 10,

Aleksandra Sekulic and Branka Bencic

Throughout 25 years, the MAFAF – a no longer existing alternative film festival that was held in Pula (Croatia) between 1965 and 1990 as an annual prelude to the Yugoslav Feature Film Festival – showcased works of outstanding Yugoslav filmmakers such as Tomislav Gotovac, Želimir Žilnik, Dusan Makavejev, and others. During MAFAF years numerous artists and filmmakers emerged that gained an important role in contemporary art, visual culture as well as professional cinematography. Despite having been the biggest event dedicated to alternative and non-professional filmmaking in Yugoslavia for almost three decades, the MAFAF seems to have dropped from collective memory, becoming invisible to the public eye. 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 contextualise 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.

The exhibition "The Invisible MAFAF", dedicated to "MAFAF- Inter cine club festival of alternative, amateur and artist cinema", will explore the emergence of conceptual art practices in visual arts, cinema and video art in Yugoslavia. The InVisible MAFAF is a research platform, a project to be realised in stages and several recognisable presentation formats. It is ment to provide room for a subjective critical reinterpretation without myth, by putting available fragments on a temporary and unstable map.

The exhibition was initially presented in the framework of "Cinemaniac 2010: The InVisible MAFAF" at the Gallery Anex and Gallery Luka (MMC LUKA) in Croatia at the Pula Film Festival in July 2010. 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.

- Branka Bencic

A Look From Belgrade

Aleksandra Sekulic

Research team: Dragomir Zupanc, Bosko Prostran, Jovan Backulja, Ivica Djodjevic

Program “A Look From Belgrade” will contribute to the ongoing development of the platform “The Invisible MAFAF” not only by adding to its historiography research, but also in detecting “invisible” continuity of the film practice of enthusiasm. Therefore, we see this program as a look on a process of emancipation of the film production, observed on the example of a public manifestation of Yugoslav cine-amateurism.

Organization: Center for Cultural Decontamination, Belgrade

Partners: MMC Luka, Pula, Pula; HFS Croatian Film Association

Supported by Ministry of Culture and Information Society of Serbia

Additional support: HAVC Croatian Audiovisual Center