25FPS Festival is Zagreb's dedicated platform for experimental film and video art, founded in 2005 in the Croatian capital and named for the PAL video standard's frame rate - a deliberate signal that the festival's interests run through the history of video as a distinct medium rather than treating digital cinema as simply an extension of celluloid tradition.
Operating as one of the most consistently rigorous festivals in Southeastern Europe for experimental moving image, 25FPS has built its identity around the intersection of avant-garde film, video art, and expanded cinema practices. The festival takes place in Zagreb's art and cultural venues and draws an international programme that places Croatian and regional Eastern European experimental work alongside global voices in the field.
Croatia has a specific and distinguished tradition in experimental animation and avant-garde film, rooted in the Zagreb School of Animated Film, which from the late 1950s through the 1970s produced work that influenced experimental animation worldwide. 25FPS operates in full awareness of this legacy, and its programming reflects an understanding that Croatia's contribution to experimental cinema is not merely historical but constitutes a living tradition with contemporary practitioners working in dialogue with it.
The festival's competition covers experimental short film and video art, and international entries compete alongside Croatian and regional work. Jury compositions reflect expertise in the specific traditions of avant-garde film and video practice rather than mainstream festival criticism, which means the prizes carry genuine weight within the experimental cinema community even if the festival has lower name recognition outside that community than a conventional film festival of equivalent quality.
For genre-cinema audiences, the connection to 25FPS runs through the experimental and surreal traditions that have always been central to the most formally ambitious horror and science fiction filmmaking. Experimental cinema and horror share deep roots: both are interested in producing states of disorientation, dread, or uncanniness in their audiences through the manipulation of image and sound, and the avant-garde tradition provides many of the formal tools that sophisticated genre directors deploy. Directors who move between experimental short film and genre features often cite experimental cinema festivals as formative contexts for their development.
The video art strand of 25FPS programming connects to broader questions about surveillance, the gaze, bodily experience, and the uncanny properties of recorded imagery - themes that run directly through found-footage horror, body-horror, and the psychological-horror traditions. The festival has shown work that explores these themes without identifying as genre, and the cross-pollination between experimental and genre communities is visible in the kind of work that circulates through both circuits.
Zagreb as a city provides the festival with an urban context that combines Central European cultural history with Southeastern European positioning - a city that has navigated significant political and cultural transitions since Croatian independence in 1991 and that has a film culture reflecting those experiences. The experimental film community in Zagreb is small but active, and 25FPS has been an important institutional anchor for it.
The festival also engages with the broader history of video as a political and artistic medium, and retrospective programming has addressed the use of video by artists and activists in contexts where cinema infrastructure was inaccessible. This historical dimension connects to questions about access, distribution, and the politics of moving image that are not irrelevant to genre cinema's own complicated relationship with distribution and exhibition norms.
25FPS Festival is a specialized but genuinely important event in Croatia and the broader European experimental cinema landscape, offering programming depth and critical seriousness that larger and better-funded festivals rarely match.
International Film Festival Rotterdam 
Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival 
Oberhausen International Short Film Festival 
Ann Arbor Film Festival 
