Interculturality, Transnationality and Recent Croatian Film

The term intercultural film applies to works in which an intercultural and transnational exchange exists. In the postcolonial era of hybrid postmodernism and globalisation, intercultural films are not merely a feature of avant-garde and guerrilla practices characteristic of the Third cinema and Imperfect film. Otherness becomes a key factor in defining national identity and in mainstream films, making it difficult to cling to the concept of national cinema. Interculturality in mainstream films refers to immigrants, people displaced to new countries. Often it is also a question of upheavals and changes in the political situation; in Croatian intercultural films we can sense the impact of war on the one hand and on the other we can see the changes that indicate a transnational and transcultural interdependency. Contemporary Croatian films refer to the Patriotic War and to confrontation with the consequences of war or their overcoming. Interculturality is especially linked to the postwar situation and the reestablishment of cooperation in the region of the so-called yugosphere. In each of these cases the Croatian national character is exercised in relation to Serbian, Bosnian or some other ethnicity. Nowadays the prevalent strategy of the films in this region is co-production, which by all means leads to trancultural dynamics. Therefore, even in cases when this exchange occurs outside of the textual level, the Croatian imaginarium is being constructed in interdependency with the other and this is becoming the common denominator of contemporary Croatian cinema.

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