Join us for the opening of the exhibition “Beforehand Afterwards” on November 27th, 2025 at 9 PM in the SKC Gallery and step into a world of traces brought to life through diverse artistic perspectives. The exhibition will be open during the festival from 5 PM to 8 PM.

This year’s edition of Student International Film Festival explores the topic of trace, which forms the basis of the exhibition in SKC Gallery, as a festival side programme. “Beforehand Afterwards” presents works by ten authors in different media, all exploring the topic of trace through their own relationships with their environment and the space.

Trace is, by definition, a mark an object leaves, a footprint, the remains of what once was, a proof of the existence of that entity. The works in this exhibition gather the aforementioned qualities of the phenomenon, observing it as a form of materialisation of the ineffable or abstract. Trace thus becomes a thought incarnate, a materialised piece of conversation, or the incarnation of time itself used to produce the sad trace, a memory related through oral tradition, a text between the lines, or a piece of computer code lost in the infinite space of the internet.

These works, as indeed all works of art, are a trace of a time and a space, created in the endless chain of action and reaction. These authors engraved their experiences and concepts into their mental matrices and then setting the loose into the world as art – all that was prior was saved for later. Their traces are proof of universal and real human experiences – prints of emotions, witnesses of time, zeitgeist on paper.

Authors: Aiden Brady (UK), Lucia Corino (IT), Daria Goncharova (RU/RS), Jérémy Griffaud (FR), Hannah Hoebeke (UK), Filip Jakubowski (PL), Poyuan Juan (TW), Ho Kun-Han (TW), Azizi Al Majid (ID) and Ana Raičević (RS/ME).
Curatorial team: Lucija Grubelić, Dora Križnik, Lucia Marcan, Ana Ptičar, Ema Puceković, Petra Radić, Dora Stipanić and Dominik Višnjić.
Text by: Lucija Grubelić (captions), Dora Križnik (programme text and captions), Lucia Marcan (captions), Ana Ptičar (captions) and Petra Radić (captions).

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The International Student Film Festival — STIFF is organized by Filmaktiv and the Student Cultural Center of the University of Rijeka, in co-organization with Art-kino and with the support of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC), the City of Rijeka, Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, the Rijeka Tourist Board, the Serbian National Council, the Council of the Serbian National Minority, and the Goethe-Institut Kroatien. The work of Filmaktiv is supported by the Kultura Nova Foundation and the National Foundation for Civil Society Development.