A Fine Balance Among the Lakes

Between the Screening Room and the Campfire: Notes on the 2026 Edition of Cinehill Film Festival

At Croatia’s Cinehill Film Festival, critic Petra Belc Krnjaić reflects on a festival where arthouse cinema, genre filmmaking, and communal experiences coexist in rare harmony. Set amid the forests and lakes of Gorski kotar, Cinehill demonstrates how a carefully curated programme and a distinctive festival atmosphere can transform filmgoing into a shared cultural experience.

Cinehill is not just a film festival; it is a cinematic event. For the last two years, the festival has taken place at the end of July in the small town of Fužine, located 730 metres above sea level in Croatia’s mountainous Gorski kotar region, surrounded by two large lakes. Unlike most festivals, Cinehill’s philosophy is to integrate cinema into the local environment, creating screening venues where no one would expect them and offering audiences a broader communal experience of watching films together. Alongside its main competition and short film programmes, the festival combines discussions, workshops, and community events for children and adults with local gastronomy, regional culture, and informal gatherings at its woodland festival hub.

The films presented this year covered a remarkably broad spectrum while maintaining a coherent artistic identity. The programme reflected the complementary sensibilities of its four selectors, balancing different cinematic approaches without ever feeling fragmented. Arthouse works such as Emmanuel Marre‘s A Man of His Time (Notre Salut), Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, Fernando Eimbcke‘s Flies (Moscas), winner of the Great Propeller Award, and Manuela Martelli‘s The Meltdown (El Deshielo), recipient of the FIPRESCI Prize, screened alongside Alberto Rodríguez‘s tense thriller Los Tigres, Anke Blondé‘s drama Dust, and Jane Schoenbrun‘s meta-slasher Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. Rather than producing an uneven programme, these contrasting sensibilities created a fine balance between entertainment and intellectual engagement, allowing each film to stand out while speaking to the varied expectations of contemporary festival audiences.

Contemporary Cool

French director Emmanuel Marre has created something remarkably unusual with A Man of His Time, a period drama set during the Second World War that avoids many conventions of the genre. Although the film received the award for Best Screenplay in the Cannes Competition, its achievements extend far beyond its script. Based on correspondence between the director’s great-grandparents during the years of Vichy France, the film adopts an epistolary structure that shapes its narrative.

Henri Marre (Swann Arlaud) is an idealistic middle-aged engineer determined to secure a position within the Vichy administration in order to implement his political vision for France. Meanwhile, his wife Paulette (Sandrine Blancke) struggles with motherhood and wartime deprivation while placing all her hopes—and her inheritance—in her husband’s ambitions. Through its measured pacing, the film patiently explores the moral ambiguities of collaboration and political compromise under Nazi occupation.

Visually, Marre creates an extraordinary cinematic language. The image resembles enlarged 16mm film stock, occasionally interrupted by direct flash photography, while unexpected musical choices—including tracks by Alphaville, Hot Butter, and Opus—contrast with documentary-style handheld camerawork reminiscent of The Office. As Marre himself explained, this aesthetic partly emerged from his research into the archives of the Vichy Ministry of Labour, where Kafkaesque bureaucratic records inspired the film’s unsettling depiction of institutional absurdity. The result feels simultaneously historical and strikingly contemporary.

Another highlight was Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, an exuberant meta-commentary on slasher cinema that also functions as a thoughtful critique of the genre’s treatment of gender and sexuality. Drawing explicitly upon Carol J. Clover‘s influential essay “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”, Schoenbrun deconstructs familiar horror conventions while simultaneously embracing them.

The story follows young filmmaker Kris (Hannah Einbinder), determined to remake the fictional cult slasher Camp Miasma, alongside the original film’s legendary Final Girl, Billy Preston (Gillian Anderson). As the narrative unfolds, feminist film theory becomes an integral part of the storytelling. The film subverts the conventions of the Final Girl, reimagines the killer’s gaze through a transgender perspective, and transforms familiar horror tropes into playful yet intellectually rigorous cinematic devices. Combining experimental techniques with the tactile beauty of 35mm film, Schoenbrun delivers a work that is both entertaining and theoretically sophisticated.

Tight Narratives and Gripping Stories

At the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum stood two tightly constructed psychological dramas: Los Tigres and Dust. Although aesthetically very different, both revolve around financial desperation.

In Los Tigres, siblings Antonio (Antonio de la Torre) and Estrella (Bárbara Lennie) become entangled with drug traffickers after Antonio discovers cocaine hidden beneath an oil tanker during his work as a professional diver. Financial pressures and family responsibilities push him towards increasingly dangerous decisions, while Estrella confronts the long-term consequences of a childhood diving accident. Much of the film unfolds underwater, where cinematographer Pau Esteve Birba captures the industrial diving operations of the Ría de Huelva petrochemical complex with extraordinary intensity. The result is both a gripping thriller and a bleak portrait of the hidden environmental and human costs sustaining modern industrial society.

Anke Blondé‘s Dust moves in a quieter but equally compelling direction. Inspired by the collapse of Belgian software company Lernout & Hauspie in 2000, it follows a programmer (Jan Hammenecker) and a corporate manager (Arieh Worthalter) during the twenty-four hours preceding their arrest for financial fraud. Their frantic journey unfolds against the backdrop of the so-called Flanders Language Valley, alternating between warmly coloured flashbacks and cool, desaturated present-day sequences whose polished corporate aesthetic evokes the late 1990s. With its disciplined direction and taut editing, Dust demonstrates how intimate psychological drama can thrive on the big screen.

Arthouse Genre and Punk Catholicism

FIPRESCI winner The Meltdown by Manuela Martelli similarly blurs generic boundaries, transforming the framework of a mystery thriller into an elegant reflection on Chile’s troubled post-Pinochet transition. Like Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur, it connects individual moral choices with broader historical experience, inviting viewers to navigate layers of political and emotional complexity.

Religious themes also emerged in two strikingly different works. Piotr Domalewski‘s The Altar Boys (Ministranci), which opened the festival, is a warm comedy-drama following four altar boys who embrace Christ’s spirit of rebellion to challenge the shortcomings of the Church from within. After the awards ceremony came Teona Strugar Mitevska‘s Mother, portraying the final days of Mother Teresa, played by Noomi Rapace, before founding her own religious order. Blending stylised compositions with rock and heavy metal music, Mitevska presents a profoundly human portrait of spiritual conviction, balancing divine calling with personal vulnerability.

The richness of Cinehill extended far beyond the main competition. Side programmes included Damjan Kozole‘s OHO Film, dedicated to the Slovenian Yugoslav avant-garde collective; contemporary cinema from Greenland and Montenegro; screenings of Edward Berger‘s Conclave and All Quiet on the Western Front (Im Westen nichts Neues); presentations from the Canadian AI film festival Cinema Shift; and a programme of 1970s home movies by Rijeka-born filmmaker Marjan Štimac, curated by the author from the Slovenian Cinematheque’s collection.

Together, these selections demonstrated a curatorial vision broad enough to embrace diverse cinematic sensibilities without sacrificing intellectual rigour. Reflecting the festival’s unique setting, the evening programme “Meet the Festival Guests” centred around a campfire lit by guests including Edward Berger and Palestinian producer Baher Agbariya. After the screenings, audiences gathered around the fire to exchange ideas, roast marshmallows, and continue conversations long into the night.

Cinehill also maintains a longstanding commitment to students by providing affordable camping accommodation beside the lake, complemented by morning forest workouts, stand-up paddleboarding, and hiking trails. These activities offered a welcome counterbalance to long hours spent in dark screening rooms.

In the end, Cinehill succeeds because it understands that cinema extends beyond the screen. Through thoughtful programming, meaningful discussions, and an atmosphere that encourages genuine encounters between filmmakers, critics, and audiences, the festival creates not simply a place to watch films, but a space in which cinema becomes part of everyday life.

Petra Belc Krnjaić
© FIPRESCI 2026