"The Subversive Film Festival has no sponsors and it depends on funds from the City of Zagreb and the Culture Ministry. This year, due to a change in the political paradigm, those funds have been drastically reduced, which has jeopardised our visibility and continuity," the festival's organisers said.
In order to "continue with its platform that promotes differences, activism and critical thinking", the festival calls on individuals, associations, civil society groups, political organisations and activists to help it raise funds through a crowdfunding campaign, launched on April 25.
It said that its programme would nonetheless keep its usual structure with the help and cooperation of the Centre for Peace Studies (CMS), the Institute for Political Ecology (IPE), the Centre for Women's Studies, the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the French and Italian cultural institutes and others.
During the fifteen festival days in May, the focus will be on new economic models, antifascist resistance, the future of the Left, trade union policies and spaces of political struggle, energy poverty and food issues, green economy and decarbonizing cities in the 21st century, Stop TTIP, CETA and TISA, the relationship between church and state, and the birth of the global world.
The film, conference and forum programs will be taking place in Zagreb’s Europa and Tuskanac cinemas and MM Center.
Among the guests of the festival are Florence Hartmann, a former spokesperson for the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, German economist Heiner Flassbeck, Spyros Sofos, a professor at the Lund University Middle Eastern Studies Centre, European Parliament member Ska Keller, and intellectuals and activists from Croatia and countries in this region.