The Revue of Amateur Film

Have you had enough of high budget films with expensive special effects and a clichéd, formulaic Hollywood plot? Once again, Zagreb will offer something different – the 9th Revue of Amateur Film, the popular RAF, which will take place between the 21st and the 27th of March, featuring more than 200 films.

Between the 21st and the 23rd of March, Zagreb’s cinema Grič will once again be the gathering spot for aficionados of unusual amateur films. They will unite for the popular RAF, the Revue of Amateur Film, which has now been organized in Zagreb for nine consecutive years.

Since the beginning, in 2002, until present, the programme of the RAF has continually changed, although it has kept the original concept of a non-commercial revue for amateur films, which are evaluated by the audience.
Apart from the standard category of amateur films that make the competition without selection, the novelty of this year’s revue is a new category of low budget films; whereby the budget must not exceed five thousand euros.
In the standard categories, audiences will have an opportunity to view a selection of shorts – no more than 20 minutes in length; films from the kids and teens category, whose creators must not be over the age of seventeen; as well as medium length (up to 60 minutes), and feature length films.

The team behind the organization of RAF is still in the process of gathering films, so it is not yet certain how many will be screened in total but, judging by experience thus far, the revue features a greater number of films each year, which in turn attracts ever increasing numbers of visitors. Last year, more than 200 films were screened and, according to statistics, they were viewed by more than six thousand visitors!

Consequently, the concurrent programme of the RAF also improves each year, featuring more concerts and other entertainment events that are also largely dominated by amateur performers. Once again this year, the focus of the organizational politics is on the exchange of ideas, interactive participation in the festival, and an ever more vigorous deconstruction of an artificially-formed boundary between professionals and amateurs, as well as organizers and the audience.