Pula Closes 73rd Edition Tonight: Golden Arenas Awarded
After a week of screenings under the open sky of the ancient Arena, the Pula Film Festival names its Golden Arena winners and audience favorite tonight at the Istrian National Theatre.
- The 73rd Pula Film Festival closes tonight at the Istrian National Theatre with the Golden Arena awards.
- The main Croatian competition featured 11 films, with Danijel Pek serving as artistic director.
- Audiences pick their own favorite through the Golden Gate of Pula prize; winners are revealed only at the ceremony.
- The main program ran from July 9 to July 16, with post-festival screenings scheduled for July 18 to 27.
There is something almost impudent about the idea of projecting film, that fragile beam of light, onto stone walls that spent two thousand years watching a very different kind of spectacle. Tonight the Pula Arena does exactly that for the last time this season: the Roman amphitheatre turns into a cinema, and a week after the first frame washed over its arches, the festival moves back under the roof of the Istrian National Theatre to tally what it has seen.
The 73rd Pula Film Festival closes with the Golden Arena awards, prizes that still carry a weight in the region that few local statuettes can match. The main program ran from July 9 to July 16, with the core evenings staged in the Arena itself, while the pre-festival days took a warm lap from July 4 to 8. Anyone who does not fit into the theatre tonight will get another chance through post-festival screenings from July 18 to 27.
What exactly is awarded tonight?
The Golden Arena is not a single prize but a whole cluster of them: statuettes go to best film, direction, screenplay and acting, and it is precisely that distribution that redraws the map of domestic cinema each year, showing who had a properly authored piece of directing this season and who merely had a good idea without a dramatic arc. This year the main Croatian competition held eleven films, a selection for which artistic director Danijel Pek answers before both the public and the profession.
Alongside the jury, the audience casts its own vote. The Golden Gate of Pula prize goes to the film that won the crowd, and those two results, jury and viewers, do not always align, which is probably the healthiest thing that can happen to a festival. The winners are kept under wraps until the ceremony itself, so even those who followed every screening in the Arena sit tonight without a safe forecast.
It is worth remembering that Pula is not only a Croatian showcase. Through minority co-productions and its international program the festival regularly lets in films from across the region, including Serbian directors and actors, so the awards in Pula are read from this side of the border too, as a gauge of where post-Yugoslav film stands when everyone ends up on the same stone.
Why Pula still holds attention
It is easy to reduce the festival to a tourist tableau, warm Istrian nights, a starry sky and a screen stretched between ancient arches. But the Arena is also an institutional test: a place where each year measures how much public money for film has turned into something audiences actually want to watch, rather than just another title in a catalogue. Cultural policy takes on a face here, and directorial styles collide before a crowd that does not forgive boredom.
Seven decades of continuity also mean that the Golden Arena remembers; it enters biographies, retrospectives, and the way the history of domestic film gets written. That is why the ceremony in the theatre is no formality but a moment that decides whose title will next year stand beside the label of an award winner.
By morning we will know the names, but the real question stays more open: will this year’s winner be a film that endures, or simply the best film in the competition that particular evening, and do you even separate those two things?
