We believe the seventh year of RAFF is still a happy one, and we are also excited about the completely new film gathering place for our audience—Cinema Murnau, on the Festival Square Pjaceta. RAFF is returning to Pjaceta for several reasons, and one of the most important is the reopening of the cinema at the place where it was launched exactly 113 years ago—on Pjaceta. This cinema brings a free, diverse program to the audience throughout the festival. We will announce the program soon.

Not why Kino Murnau? It’s Rab again. Namely, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888-1931) was one of the greatest and most influential directors in cinema history and one of the most famous representatives of German expressionism. He is one of the authors who elevated film as an art form, beyond its original purpose and understanding as a new technology created for entertainment. Murnau’s most famous and influential work is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horrors (1922), considered the first horror film, and an inevitable inclusion on any list of the best movies ever.

A year after his most famous film, Nosferatu, in 1923, this director began filming his only comedy, The Finances of the Grand Duke. It is a comedy in which two usurpers want to seize the island-duchy of Grand Duke Ramon XX of Abbac, who is facing bankruptcy. The island of Rab plays the duke’s island in Murnau’s film. Along with Split, where parts of the film were also filmed, the views of the town with its four bell towers, Rab, are the easiest to spot in the film’s final version.

Arriving on the Adriatic coast in 1923 to film The Finances of the Grand Duke, Murnau was already a star among European film directors thanks to the success of Nosferatu. UFA, the largest production company on the continent at the time, produced the film. It starred celebrated and super-popular actors such as Harry Liedtke, Madi Christians, and Max Schreck, who played Count Orlok in Nosferatu. It was a big deal for the locations where the film was shot, including Split and Rab – even bigger than the filming of Game of Thrones or Star Wars: The Last Jedi in Dubrovnik and Split in the 21st century. Today, it is the oldest surviving foreign-produced feature film in Croatia.

This film premiered in Berlin in 1924 and began international distribution a year later. That year, it premiered in Croatia only in Zagreb, at the then Balkan Cinema (now closed Europa Cinema), in early September 1925. Exactly one hundred years later, we are marking this significant anniversary with this gala screening, where the film was shot, in the city where it will be shown publicly to the people of Rab for the first time.

To this end, we are incredibly honoured that the celebrated Croatian composer and pianist Matej Meštrović has agreed to enrich this gala screening with a Croatian authorial contribution: his piano accompaniment to Murnau’s film.

At the same time, the RAFF Directorate, in cooperation with the Town of Rab and the Rab Open University, decided to officially open its third cinema—Cinema Murnau—with this screening on the Zero day of the Festival, as part of the RAFF Intro program, on the Festival Square Pjaceta on August 22nd. This screening, and Cinema Murnau’s entire program, will be offered to the people of Rab and their guests completely free of charge.
This film will be screened in cooperation with the Stiftung Murnau from Wiesbaden (Germany), the Goethe Institute Croatia, and the Zagreb Film Festival.

We hope you will join us in marking this important centenary for the Town of Rab and Croatian cinematography.