This year’s RAFF Talk program deals with propaganda and manipulation, which seems to have been perfected using modern technologies. In parallel with only factual or investigative journalism, it appears that it is losing its space more and more. Newsrooms that nurture this type of journalism are disappearing one by one. In some cases, this disappearance of space for female investigative journalists is abrupt, while in other cases it is surprisingly gradual, almost elegant. It is as if there is a silent project of euthanasia of this type of journalism.
On the first day of the festival, on Saturday, August 23, on Festival Square Pjaceta journalists whose biographies are linked to quality, factual and contextualised journalism will participate in the panel entitled Investigative journalism without a newsroom: Zoran Kusovac, Nataša Božić Šarić, Aleksandar Trifunović and Mila Moralić. BBC journalist Žarka Radoja will moderate the conversation.
As part of the Partner Country – Kingdom of the Netherlands program, in the RAFF film competition, we are screening the Dutch documentary film The Propagandist, directed by Luuk Bouwman, which won the award for best Dutch documentary film at one of the most important documentary film festivals – IDFA, in Amsterdam. Using previously unpublished interviews, diaries, family footage and propaganda films, The Propagandist follows the rise and fall of Dutch filmmaker Jan Teunissen, who lived from 1898 to 1975. During World War II, he became the most powerful man in the Dutch film industry. As head of the Film Department of the SS and the Dutch Nazi Party, the NSB, he became known as the “film emperor” and “the Dutch Leni Riefenstahl”.
A day later, on Sunday, August 24, at 11 a.m. on the Festival Square Pjaceta, they will speak about propaganda that can hardly be easily forgotten as a relic of the past, or about its unfortunately exceptional power even today – Margje de Koning, artistic director of one of the largest human rights film festivals in the world, Movies that Matter, then journalist Prof. Dr. Tena Perišin from the Zagreb Faculty of Political Sciences, one of the initiators of the Investigative Journalism course at her faculty, and also journalist Dr. Tomislav Levak, a lecturer at the Academy of Arts and Culture (Department of Culture, Media and Management) in Osijek, who teaches the Disinformation in New Media course.
On Monday, August 26, at the exact location at 11 a.m., the citizens of Rab will be among the first in Europe to watch the first episode of the investigative documentary series The Truth Effect, produced by the European University Institute in Italy in collaboration with the European Media and Information Fund. The series director is Andrei Pichyienko, and the producer is Youssef Zeineddine. Both will attend this premiere, after which they will talk with their Croatian colleague Silvana Menđušić, an investigative journalist with journalistic experience in all forms of media, from print, television, to web portals. Journalist Žarka Radoja will also moderate this conversation.
