After the summer break, Kino učionica returns with a series of film screenings and discussions organised by the Center for Women’s Studies at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Rijeka. Throughout 2026, the programme uses film, lectures and discussions to examine trends of remilitarisation in Croatia, Europe and around the world.
The first autumn session will take place on Wednesday, 23 September at 6:30 p.m. at Club Palach in Rijeka, focusing on the gamification of war.
Video games and simulation technologies are increasingly being used as military training grounds, blurring the boundaries between play and preparation, between killing and clicking. The same interfaces used to operate military drones are mirrored in commercial gaming platforms, shaping attention, reflexes and obedience through militarised ways of seeing.
This session explores how militarism infiltrates popular culture through the logic of entertainment, turning violence into spectacle and empathy into tactical awareness. The topic will be explored through a screening of the short animated film essay How to Disappear by the collective Total Refusal (Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf; Austria, 2020, 21 min), followed by a guest lecture by Belgian researcher Briar Dickey.
How to Disappear is an anti-war film in the fullest sense of the word, searching for possibilities of peace in the most unlikely of places: an online war game. The film is an ode to disobedience and desertion, both in digital and real-world warfare. Set against the picturesque battlefields of the video game Battlefield V, it uses hyperrealistic graphics as the backdrop for an essayistic narrative tracing the history of desertion—an important yet rarely illuminated part of human history.
Total Refusal is an artistic collective engaged in the critical appropriation of contemporary video games. Starting from the conviction that the medium has yet to fulfil its full cultural potential, the collective seeks to put digital game spaces to new uses. Moving within virtual worlds while rejecting their prescribed modes of play, its members redirect their resources towards new activities and narratives, creating “public” spaces with critical potential.
Briar Dickey is a PhD researcher at Vrije Universiteit Brussel whose research interests include (anti-)fascism, subjectivity, resistance and video games. His doctoral research examines the ways in which fascist actors use and appropriate digital games, as well as the potential for resistance that games may offer. His work draws on critical, decolonial and anti-authoritarian perspectives on power, domination, capitalism and the political economy of media. In his lecture, he will present current research on the relationship between digital games and fascism/fascisation, with a particular focus on the connections between video games, masculinity and militarism, alongside insights from his own research.
The lecture will be held in English.
Admission is free!
The programme is supported by the City of Rijeka and the Embassy of the Kingdom of Norway.
