Occupation in 26 Pictures

Dubrovnik, 1941. Three friends—Niko, a Croatian, Miho, a Jew, and Toni, an Italian—spend their youth in carefree harmony until war shatters their world. The Italian invasion disrupts their lives, and fascism seeps into the city’s sunlit streets, transforming the dazzling beauty of the Adriatic into the stage for a brutal display of power and cruelty. Old bonds fracture, loyalty becomes a death sentence, and violence turns into both a weapon and a spectacle. Drawing on Italian modernism and poetic cinema, Lordan Zafranović crafts a singular vision of war’s apocalypse—marked by stark contrasts, visual grandeur, and raw realism. Occupation in 26 Pictures hypnotizes with its stylization and shocks with its unflinching brutality, capturing not only the collapse of friendship in an age of impossible choices but also a profound meditation on the mechanisms of evil and dehumanization. One of the most haunting and controversial works of Yugoslavian anti-war cinema—a film that fascinates, unsettles, and refuses to be forgotten.

Maša Guštin

The film print was provided by the Croatian State Archive.

Lordan Zafranović (b. 1944) is a director born in Maslinica (now Croatia), best known for his trilogy dedicated to World War II. The first part, Occupation in 26 Pictures (1978), presented at the Cannes Film Festival, is a personal narrative in which images from the Italian occupation intertwine with reflections on history and everyday life. The trilogy is completed by The Fall of Italy (1981), starring Daniel Olbrychski, and Evening Bells (1986). Zafranović’s work is often associated with the so-called Black Wave of Yugoslav cinema, a movement shaped in the 1960s by filmmakers such as Dušan Makavejev and Aleksandar Petrović.