‘Concrete Utopia’

The 1960s and 1970s in Croatia were marked by an overall growth, expressed through industrialisation, urbanisation and search for a third path on the geopolitical spectrum. The prevailing optimism found its expression in contemporary art, as well as in modernist architecture. At the same time, cinema offered clever ways to confront the overall optimism with more sombre issues lurking beneath the joyful surface. 
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Concrete Utopia offers a brief introduction in the art and social history: a dialogue between past and present, optimism and doubt, utopia and reality. The programme is organised around Slumbering Concrete, a ground-breaking TV series that explores the heritage of masterpieces of socialist architecture. A selection of Croatian cinema classics tackles the same or similar issues as those in the series, in which architecture is used as a plot device, a metaphor or as a vehicle to express the Zeitgeist.