These questions were at the centre of the film programme “Critical Reading Through Film”, held as part of the spring edition of KRIK – Festival for Critical Culture in Skopje. The programme was curated by Petar Milat, director and selector of the Human Rights Film Festival in Zagreb, and brought to Skopje from its original context in Zagreb as a travelling programme of critical cinema.
Organized around the festival’s overarching theme, “Care: Ways of Being Together,” the programme brought together audiences for three evenings of cinema that invited critical reflection on the social and political conditions shaping our shared lives.
The programme featured three films: With Hassan in Gaza by Kamal Aljafari, Fiume o Morte! by Igor Bezinović, and Magellan by Lav Diaz. Together, these works move across different geographies and historical moments, engaging with questions of memory, power, occupation, and the construction of historical narratives.
Rather than offering easy answers, the screenings opened a temporary public space for dialogue and collective reflection. They invited audiences to engage with difficult histories and to consider how care can function as a political practice—one that challenges indifference and opens possibilities for solidarity and responsibility.
Supported by Pro Peace North Macedonia, the programme reflects a broader commitment to fostering critical engagement with the past and creating spaces where complex social realities can be explored through art and culture. In this sense, film becomes more than a medium of representation; it becomes a way of collectively imagining how we might live together in the present and the future.
KRIK – Festival for Critical Culture is supported within the project “Culture for Development” of the Government of Switzerland, implemented by the Heartefact Fund. The content and expressed views do not necessarily reflect the views of the Government of Switzerland and the Heartefact Fund.
KRIK – Festival for Critical Culture is also supported by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Skopje, Goethe-Institut Skopje, and the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of the Republic of North Macedonia. Additionally it is is supported by the European Fund for the Balkans, in cooperation organized by the Network of European Foundations.
