On 17 July 2017, at the Croatian Chamber of Economy in Pula, a meeting of the working group of this year's Pula Film Festival was held. The meeting was centred around archives and Festival materials in the period from 1954 to 2017. The participants were Jugoslav Pantelić, director of Yugoslav Film Archive, Miroljub Vučković, head of international cooperation at Film Center Serbia, Carmen Lothka, head of Department for Protection and Restoration of Film Heritage at Croatian State Archives - Croatian Film Archive, Gracijano Kešac, director of the Historical and Maritime Museum of Istria, Jasna Jaklin on behalf of the Governing Board of the Public Institution Pula Film Festival, Gordana Restović, director of the Public Institution Pula Film Festival, and Tanja Miličić, manager of Valli Cinema and project manager.
At last year's 63th Pula Film Festival, the Public Institution Pula Film Festival initiated the establishment of a comprehensive collection of festival material. The initiative was joined by Yugoslav Film Archive, Croatian State Archives - Croatian Film Archive, Public Institution Pula Film Festival, and later on, Film Center Serbia and Historical and Maritime Museum of Istria, with support of the City of Pula, also joined the initiative.
The open ambition since last year's Festival to today has had significant results. All of the participants of the initiative have gone through their archives and have listed their material. More than 5,000 items have been listed (various documents, posters, rule books, statutes, business letters, letters to guests, price lists, invitations, reports, analyses, programme concepts, flyers, catalogues, accreditations, various promotional material, trailers, opening credits, photographs, etc.), and an extremely high number of newspaper articles of the most famous daily, weekly and monthly papers and magazines published across former Yugoslavia, such as. To illustrate, the recognised and esteemed Belgrade Film Archive has 5,087 newspaper articles from the period 1957 to 1990.
The Public Institution Pula Film Festival has published a timeline on its webpage, a timeline of all award winners , a search option for award winners, and links to webpages of previous editions of the Festival, as well as information on each of the Festival editions up to the 53rd Pula Film Festival, when the webpage was introduced.
Following an interesting discussion, the participants agreed that the following is needed for quality preservation of the rich and sizeable festival material: systematize the material according to theme and time period, systematize the material for the wider interested public and specialised researchers, create a single webpage to include the list of materials from all participants so the interested public, students, film researchers, and others know where to find the information they need, list all films ever screened at Pula Film Festival, along with basic information, and create a search option for films, and in 2018, for the 65th anniversary of the Festival, publish a themed Festival edition.
