The Katarina Cinema is an evening open air cinema programme that
takes place along the coast of the Pula Bay during the summer months. It began
as a guerrilla pop-up cinema in 2016. That year and the following, the
programme took place on the island of Saint Katarina in the Pula Bay, which
lent the project its name. After a private company was granted a concession to
build a tourist complex and marina on the island, in 2018, the screenings moved
to the northern part of the Bay, Vallelunga. This former military zone is an
abandoned, peripheral part of the city of Pula, but nonetheless it gathers
numerous enthusiasts and provides a space for various activities. In that
sense, both motivating the community to use and re-invent these spaces and
promoting the idea that it is necessary for them to be available to all
citizens constitute an important aspect of the Katarina Cinema. Furthermore, taking
place in an area that, during the summer months, focuses solely on tourism, the
Katarina Cinema strives to cater to and create primarily for the local
audience. The Katarina Cinema project is guided by DIY principles and it
represents an intervention that constitutes a reaction to certain topical
community issues or needs, which the establishment fails to address. Evoking
the tradition of local summer cinemas that used to be ubiquitous, the Katarina
Cinema programme takes place once a month from June to September in locations that
do not constitute the centre of the supposed periphery, but rather function as
the periphery of that periphery, which emphasizes the necessity of culture
being available outside the centres. What makes these screenings special
is their discursive part; namely, short introductory lectures and open discussions
that take place after the movie, promoting a feminist perspective and criticism
from the very beginning of the project. From one gathering to the next, the
cinema presents new guest speakers who give the introduction, which encourages a
discussion and re-consideration of topical issues, focusing primarily on the
position of women in society. The topics covered through these
screenings included workers’ rights, a discrepancy between the emancipation of
women, socialism and modernisation, the double oppression of women,
reproductive rights, female body as the site of ideological struggle, as well
as the demise of textile and shipbuilding industries in the context of issues
ranging from reproductive work to class and gender, but also social inequality
in the broader sense.
Kontakt
Vizualni identitet i plakati: Oleg Morović / nakonjusmo.net
Prijevod: Petra Požgaj
©Kino Katarina 2019