New film by Ana Hušman Postcards (2013) is a continuation of her rethinking of identity, language and performativity, this time through the medium of a postcard as a fragment (of language) and fantasy. The postcard becomes a platform for exercising or preserving the language of ex-patriots – seen here in different performative stagings – living with the Croatian language as a foreign body while preserving it as a fantasy of the country they are coming from.

The author says: I was interested in an imaginative homeland and an ex-patriot’s fantasy of the return; the language which they took with them and which is now held in order to maintain their identity. The land they left is a place filled with nostalgia and melancholy. It is a place you can’t return to. There everything is good.

The use of role play, drama, expressive reading, staging fairy tales, reading and writing postcards are the methods used for learning Croatian as a foreign language. A textbook and postcards sent from the United States to Croatia are the starting point for improvised situations performed by artists and actors such as Nicole Hewitt, Davor Sanvicenti, Vili Matula, Tvrtko Jurić, Jadranka Đokić, Tanja Vrvilo, Boris Bakal, Damir Bartol Indoš, Darko Masnec, Petar Milat...

Postcards was developed during two years: first as a three-channel installation, then as a film. The film was presented at the exhibition Videofragments of Ana Hušman and Marko Tadić in May 2013 in the Student Center Gallery in Zagreb, and then repeated in November in the Gallery Podroom in Belgrade. Festival premiere was in the Competition Program of the 25 FPS Festival in Zagreb in September 2013, and shortly after the film was screened in the Art-kino Croatia in Rijeka.