Archived: HATTERS

(…) After all, everything is already written in the drama. Everything I wanted to say about returns and departures, about designing life and the fear of them, gay engagements, fascists, the change of generations, about hipster Christmas, love and friendship, and urban families. It’s been a year since the play was written. And I’m no slightly smarter than I was then (and I should). I wish I could score strongly. (Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to write text for a booklet). But still I know two things I didn’t know last year, a few months after my return. Everything actually turned out fine, because of a friend. Friendships survive regardless of any emotional, financial, or moral disaster. And there is no greater privilege than creating with friends (a drama about friendship).

Dino Pesut

I immediately connected with this Zeitgeist piece, which burns in the anxious atmosphere in which we trapped in prolonged adolescence live. (…) The death of a tradition that this generation feels on its skin more than any other so far, apart from great freedom, brings great uncertainty, and uncertainty is easiest to fight against hatred. When we add to that the fact that this is primarily Pesut’s autobiographical fiction, this story becomes an intimate, warm guide to survival in the 1920s. We wanted the best division in the world that would have ingenious fun for days at the expense of this unbearable era of ours and we succeeded. Their characters come to the party for their own salvation, which they try to fight for in their own specific way, and they seek their peace very actively, even when they are completely catatonic. This search usually takes place to the detriment of their friendship, the boundaries of which we explore in this process and which we often admire. I hope that this show, just like any other, will be a consolation for the troubled and a distress for the peaceful. (Banksy)

Judita Gamulin

HATTERS and LOSERS talk about our generation, the generation of young cultural workers who are constantly rushing somewhere, dancing, partying, taking drugs, crying, loving, leaving, coming back, and sometimes killing themselves. A generation born during socialism, an adult in capitalism, who eagerly awaited episodes of Glamor Caffe and Sex and the City in their late-night provinces to flee at the age of 18 despite studying in the metropolis with the hope that they would eventually be saved from traumas of war, poverty, failure, themselves, etc. (()

Assuming that all our elections are wrong anyway, "Isn't it okay to finally be satisfied with them and reconcile", Pesut asks? (…) HEATERS Dina Pešuta talk about that optimism, optimism that is visible in a small sample, friends who, in our case, belong to a certain class of cultural workers. However, it should be argued that this optimism is inseparable from the system to which we belong. Thus, the fiction of Dina Pešut is not inseparable from the writer Dino Pešut, who directs, discusses, describes the political and social context, writes letters to the director from his Zagreb studio. His voice resonates with the same studio somewhere in Berlin, Belgrade, Vienna, Brussels. And if Pesut and HATTERS are to be believed, the first task of our dislocated generation is to persevere in their wrong choices. The next step, it seems to me, is to connect those scattered bubbles in which we linger by increasing the reach of optimism.

Mila Pavicevic

While Dino Pešut creates dramatic situations that clearly and almost logically articulate the reality he is referring to, Judita Gamulin is prone to somewhat more subtle decisions that, after all, the medium of film itself allows. Formally speaking, this is a very different approach to the material, which can become a serious challenge. Although it is not at all unusual to see film directors in the function of theatrical (and vice versa), Judita Gamulin understands the means of film expression to such an extent that she eliminates the desire to consume the same content in another medium. In this sense, it becomes exciting to see how the language of the theatrical medium as a language independent of dramatic material will develop. Creating a video in the play Leica format, based on the novel by Daša Drndić, at the Croatian National Theater Ivan pl. Zajc, Judita Gamulin showed understanding towards the dialogic potential between the film and theatrical image, ie the performance situation, which suggests that this understanding will be fully developed in the work on the play HATTERS

Natasha Antulov

Age group 17+