We inaugurate this year’s film and video programme and a series of moderated discussions with a screening and conversation featuring visual artist, filmmaker and educator Phil Collins. Through moving image, photography, installation, performative situations, and live events, his work brings to the fore aspects of everyday experience and voices that have often been disregarded. The programme includes a screening of Collins’ video work Ceremony (DE/UK, 2018, 67’), followed by a conversation with the artist. A visually rich mosaic of genres – including road movie, experimental television broadcast and socialist-activist mass event – Ceremony reasserts the idea of communism as a visionary alternative to the tyranny of capital that governs our political, economic and emotional lives. A century after the 1917 October Revolution, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, a decommissioned statue of Engels travels from a village in Eastern Ukraine across Europe to Manchester, the world’s first industrial city and Engels’ home for over twenty years, where it is inaugurated as a new public monument. The film follows the statue’s journey and, in parallel, looks at social conditions in 21st-century Britain.

Phil Collins is a visual artist, filmmaker and educator based in Berlin and Wuppertal. He is internationally recognised for a socially engaged practice that traverses the intersections of art, politics and popular culture. Across geographies, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, and social classes, Collins’ approach is guided by an ethos of connection and solidarity in the ongoing struggles for social justice and collective liberation.

The screening is a part of the film and video program „Remember Freedom: Images of Resistance“. The programme will be held in English. 

The program is supported by:
Office for Culture and Civil Society of the City of Zagreb
Kultura Nova Foundation
Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC)