The festival also organizes a large special program based around a particular theme spread over 15 to 20 individual programs. The theme provides a framework within which the varied shapes taken by short film nowadays can be shown.
2002's theme is Catastrophe. It's hypothesis is that catastrophe is the unsettling shadow of progress.
Catastrophe shows how images regulate the ambivalence between attraction and fear - in documentaries, experimental films, music videos, short movies etc. by Adbusters, Harun Farocki, Alexander Hahn, Sharon Lockhart, Kristin Lucas, MVRDV, Olivier Zabat and many others.
In the Special program work of:
John Maybury, first generation modern avant-garde artist, making subversive, utopian, angry cinema. He will also present largely unknown Super-8 works and music videos.
Joyce Wieland, Canadian artist and filmmaker, a comprehensive retrospective.
John Smith, funny, vital and continuously astonishing storytelling with a healthy disregard of the boundaries between fact and fiction.
Karpo Godina and Zelimir Zilnik show outcasts, drinkers, whores, unemployed and ethnic minorities while settling the score with false avant-gardism, empty left-wing phrases and social demagogy.