When Puppets Rule the City

The 41st International Puppet Festival kicked off on the 29th of August and will end on the 5th of September. The festival, organized by the International Center for Providing Services in Culture (MCUK) has gained a strong reputation all over the world. Since its very beginnings, it has been open to all forms of puppetry expression, techniques, genres and topics. In addition to a fairly standard program, this year's PIF features several puppet and animated films.

During the PIF, Zagreb's theaters, streets and squares become venues of numerous puppet shows, traditional, modern and experimental. The program includes highlights for both children and adults.

So far, over 450 theaters from every continent have shown their skills at the festival.
This year's selection is based mostly on acts from Central and Eastern Europe (the Czech Republic, Poland, Slovenia, Belarus, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, and Bulgaria), several shows from Italy, Belgium, France and Great Britain and six Croatian plays.

On the 20th of August, the festival was launched with the Czech Vaskokodeska Theater Continuo and its stylized commedia dell'arte, which was entirely created from recycled paper, excluding the performers and instruments. The last festival day, the 5th of September, is reserved for animated films for children and puppet films for adults by the Green Ginger Theater from Bristol. These are to take place at the Tuškanac movie theater.

PIF (Pupteatra Internacia Festivalo as it is called in Esperanto) was founded in 1968 by the members of the Students' Esperanto Club in Zagreb and it has been taking place every year since, at the end of August and beginning of September at different venues across the city. This year, the venues are the Komedija Theater, the Teatar &TD, ZKM (Zagreb's Youth Theater) and ZKL (Zagreb's Puppet Theater), as well as the Flower Square, Oktogon and other open air spaces.