Bistri vitez Don Quijote iz Medviđe – Vedran Ružić
Bistri vitez Don Quijote iz Medviđe is a hand-drawn animated short that reinterprets Cervantes’ iconic knight-errant within a contemporary, hyper-local Croatian context. His famous windmills are replaced by the petty absurdities, bureaucratic obstacles, and daily frustrations of modern life—systems that wear people down through relentless accumulation. Every frame is drawn by hand in ballpoint pen on paper and scanned, turning the slow, labour-intensive process into an act of resistance to the accelerated pace of digital production and automation. The rough, intimate aesthetic makes time and human effort visible, reflecting the artist’s broader practice. Don Quijote becomes a figure of irrational persistence: someone who keeps confronting systems that produce seemingly meaningless obstacles. The film connects to the artist’s Good Timing? series, which examines how bureaucracy and social systems consume and fragment our time. It explores stubbornness as a survival strategy—and the strange dignity of fighting windmills when the windmills are real.
Vedran Ružić
Vedran Ružić (Rijeka, 1986) is a visual artist, jazz musician and filmmaker. He graduated in painting from the Academy of Applied Arts in Rijeka and studied at the jazz conservatory in Klagenfurt. He has released six jazz albums and received the 2017 Porin Award for Best Jazz Album for Spiritual Market, a multimedia project accompanied by the experimental hybrid film of the same name (38’, 2017), in which he co-wrote the screenplay and starred, in collaboration with directors John Kardum and Ira Tomić.
He is also the author of 6 Meters (24’, 2022), which he wrote, directed, and starred in.
