2012 · Croatian short fiction film anthology distributed on DVD with daily newspapers · Audiovisual distribution and promotion project
Croatian short-film DVD distribution concept built for broad, non-festival public audiences in Croatia.
Koncept masovne distribucije hrvatskog kratkog igranog filma - trideset i šest filmova na šest jeftinih DVD izdanja uz dnevne novine.
I built 6-for-6 because the festival circuit is a beautiful dead end. A short film screens two or three times and then it lives on a hard drive. I wanted the opposite problem - too many copies, in too many kiosks, at a price nobody has to think about. Six kuna. That number did more design work than anything else in the project.
Most of what you can see here is the machinery: the budgets that grew from 178.762,50 kn in 2011 to 260.012,00 kn in the 2012 HAVC application, the distribution contract, the letters of intent from Luka Rukavina and Studio dim. That part I am proud of, because it was real - people signed. What I cannot show you is the ending. The Tisak negotiation never closed, I have no sales figures and no payout to report, and the discs never reached the kiosks the way I planned. I would rather say that plainly than dress up a plan as an outcome. What 6-for-6 proves is that I can design a distribution system end to end; what it does not prove is that this one shipped.
- Matija Radeljak
Croatian short fiction films kept getting made, and kept vanishing into the same narrow channel: a festival slot, a jury, a room of people who already care. 6-for-6 was Matija Radeljak's attempt to route those films somewhere else entirely - to the newspaper kiosk, and from there into the hands of people who would never buy a festival ticket.
The idea arrived in 2011 as a modest frame: thirty films across five DVDs, a summer rollout, a first budget of 178.762,50 HRK (~25k €) dated December 2011. By late 2012 it had been rebuilt into something more disciplined and more commercial - thirty-six films across six editions, each disc priced at 6 kn (80c) and carried on the circulation rhythm of a daily newspaper. The price point was the whole argument. At six kuna, a short-film anthology stops being a cultural gesture and becomes an impulse buy, and the release stops being a launch and becomes a habit.
The financing was engineered rather than hoped for. The 7 November 2012 structure totalled 220.412,00 kn, with the largest single line - 102.500,00 kn - going to distribution rather than production. The HAVC complementary-activities application dated 23 November 2012 scaled the package to 260.012,00 kn, built around a 123.500,00 kn grant request to the Hrvatski audiovizualni centar, with Aning Film and the participating producers modelled as return-investment partners and a tiered repayment share that shifted with sales volume. It reads like a distribution business plan, not a subsidy wishlist.
The commitments were real. A distribution contract gave Aning Film authority to negotiate and run distribution and promotion for the project term, and rights holders began signing on before any campaign existed: Luka Rukavina committed his film in a letter of intent from Zagreb on 19 November 2012, and Studio dim signed on 21 November 2012 to place the short Krupni otpad, directed by Marina Andree Skop, into the slate. Negotiations with Tisak media - the kiosk network that would have made the whole model physically possible - were underway.
Then the record goes quiet. There are no confirmed sales figures, no payout ledger, no press clippings, and the Tisak deal stayed open. What 6-for-6 actually delivered was the harder, invisible half of distribution: a complete rights-clearance and mass-market release system - editorial concept, legal framework, financing mechanics, and signed partner intent - assembled to production-grade before a single disc was pressed. It is the clearest proof in the Aning Film record of the service the studio does best: designing a market for work that had none.
Related work: The seventh art