Vukovar Film Festival Director: 'Our greatest success is becoming part of the city's identity'

The Vukovar Film Festival is marking its 20th anniversary, a milestone that Director Darko Puharić believes signifies its deep integration into the city's identity. Launched in 2007 by Discovery Film and the City of Vukovar, the festival's initial goal was to inject new cultural life into the city, both domestically and internationally, and to contribute to its post-war social and physical reconstruction.

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When we look back to 2007, we can best see how far the Vukovar Film Festival has come. Discovery Film and the City of Vukovar launched the festival with a very clear intention – to give Vukovar, in addition to domestic, a new international dimension of cultural life and to contribute to the city's renewal through film, not only physically but also socially.

At its inception, Vukovar lacked a functional cinema, with its theaters destroyed during the war. A generation had grown up without the experience of communal film viewing. This context inspired one of the festival's most unique features: a cinema on a river barge on the Danube. From the outset, the festival eschewed a traditional, enclosed format, instead embracing Vukovar's urban landscape as its natural stage.

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Twenty years later, I think the greatest success is precisely that the festival has become an integral part of the city's identity.

Two decades later, Puharić highlights the festival's success in becoming an integral part of Vukovar's identity. While the program, scale, locations, and production standards have evolved, the core mission remains: to reconnect audiences with film and the shared experience of watching it. In the last four years, Puharić has focused on expanding the festival's scope, adding short films and animation to its official competitions alongside features and documentaries. The festival now features nine-member juries and has significantly increased attendance.

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The park of the Eltz Manor has become the heart of the festival and the place where something happens that I consider one of the greatest values of VFF – the audience stays after the screenings, talks, socializes with actors, directors, and other filmmakers. That barrier between the audience and the people who create film disappears.