Meet the creator of videos making Croatians emotional about their past
- by croatiaweek
- in Entertainment
(Instagram/philatz)
By Hana Klain
While most people associate artificial intelligence with the future, for Filip Filković, better known as Philatz, it has become a way of reconnecting with the past.
His viral AI-generated videos serve as an emotional time machine, bringing back a Zagreb that many remember fondly and that younger generations are only now discovering.
Through scenes of neighbourhood gatherings, winter walks, tram rides, trips to Sljeme and everyday customs that have gradually disappeared from city life, Philatz has tapped into a powerful sense of nostalgia while reminding audiences of values often overlooked in today’s fast-paced digital world.
His series Spomenar has become a social media phenomenon precisely because it is not simply about the past. It also reflects what many people feel is missing today: a slower pace of life, stronger human connections and a sense of belonging.
An award-winning director and the creator of the documentary series Dulum zemlje, the Mali Zagreb project and numerous film and artistic ventures, Filković has long explored the relationship between place, identity and emotion.
In this interview, he discusses how his AI videos are created, why nostalgia resonates so strongly today and whether artificial intelligence could become a powerful new tool for preserving cultural heritage and collective memory.
Your AI videos often feel like living memories. When did you first realise that artificial intelligence could be a tool for preserving emotions, rather than simply a piece of technology?
I no longer have my parents or close family members, so I often found myself returning to old photographs. At one point, I started using them as a starting point for creating new scenes, images that are not documentary records but still carry the same emotional weight.
A friend encouraged me to turn this into a project connected to my own family. I generated a scene of a street that no longer exists, and when I saw the result, I was not looking at an AI-generated image, I was looking at a memory. Something that had lived only inside me suddenly became visible. I could share it with someone else.
That was the moment I realised this technology could be used to preserve things that are disappearing.
Philatz (Photo: Private album)
Can AI become a kind of digital scrapbook for families, cities and entire destinations?
I think it already has, at least in the case of my Spomenar series. In fact, I believe this could become one of its most important uses.
Imagine every family being able to create a living visual archive from old photographs, letters and stories, something their grandchildren could truly experience rather than simply browse through.
Cities that are disappearing, neighbourhoods being demolished, traditional crafts fading away, all of these could be given new life and inspire future generations.
I am not particularly nostalgic by nature, but in this context I think nostalgia can be incredibly valuable. It is not a replacement for reality; it is a bridge between generations.
Which project affected you most emotionally because AI allowed you to bring back a memory that might otherwise have been lost?
There is one Spomenar video that recreates a type of shop that no longer exists, the old mixed-goods store with a wooden counter and that distinctive lighting.
I primarily create every video in this series for myself. Then messages started arriving from people who said they had cried while watching it because it took them straight back to childhood, to visits to a grandmother’s neighbour, to a morning they thought they had forgotten forever.
At that point, the memory was no longer just mine. It became something collective. AI helped bring it back to the surface.
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You have portrayed Croatia many times through your distinctive visual style. If you had to show Croatia to a foreign visitor in a single 30-second AI video, what would it include?
It would not feature Dubrovnik.
Instead, it would show a morning on an island that never appears on tourist posters. A fisherman pulling in his nets. Children catching gobies from a pier. The scent of the sea. A dry-stone wall that has stood for five hundred years. A cat sleeping in the shade.
It would capture the sound of silence that is actually full of life.
That is the Croatia those of us who live here know well, but tourists rarely see because they are often focused on what they have been told they must visit.
How could artificial intelligence change the way tourists experience destinations such as Croatia?
Before they even arrive, visitors could experience the lifestyle. That is what interests me, AI as an introduction to the emotional character of a place rather than simply a guide.
Imagine watching a short film before visiting Rovinj.
Instead of telling you where to park, it would reveal how the town has felt throughout history, the kind of people it has shaped and the stories hidden within its walls.
You would arrive already emotionally connected to the destination. Only then do you truly see what is in front of you.
I think this is where many promotional films fall short. They approach destination marketing too narrowly and reduce a place to a handful of predictable shots.
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Can AI help lesser-known Croatian destinations, local heritage and community stories gain the same attention as the country’s most famous tourist attractions?
That may be the most exciting possibility of all.
Major tourist destinations have budgets, agencies and powerful marketing machines behind them. A small village in Slavonia, a forgotten Adriatic harbour or a mountain hamlet with its last remaining blacksmith has none of those advantages.
AI helps level the playing field.
A compelling story, a powerful video and genuine emotion can travel around the world in a matter of days. Heritage does not need wealth to become visible. It simply needs to be told in the right way.
If you could bring one moment from Croatian history to life and turn it into an AI experience for visitors, which moment would you choose?
I would choose the moment when the first Croats saw the sea.
I am not sure whether that belongs more to myth or history, but as an image it carries enormous power. A person standing before something infinite for the first time and realising they have arrived, that this is home.
It is a story that speaks to the identity of an entire nation.
Visitors experiencing that moment would not be watching a historical reconstruction. They would be experiencing the emotion of a beginning.
If you were creating a video today that would make someone immediately book a trip to Croatia, what would its main message be?
The message would not be “come and see”. It would be “come and feel”.
Croatia is a country for the eyes, but also for every other sense: the scent of the bura wind, the texture of stone, the taste of fish caught that same morning and the silence that somehow has a colour of its own.
Those things can never be fully captured in a photograph. They must be experienced.
That is why I believe Croatia should not be associated with only one season. If the experience is authentic, there are reasons to visit throughout the year.
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If artificial intelligence is the tool of the future, what will always remain uniquely human in the stories we tell about travel, places and memories?
The reason we care in the first place.
AI can generate a perfect image of the sea, but it cannot feel how the sea changes your breathing. It cannot know why a particular street in a particular town became part of you forever.
A human travel story is always a story of transformation: you leave as one person and return as another.
That is why travel should never be just a travelogue. It is, in many ways, an autobiography of emotion.
That is where AI reaches its limit and the human experience begins. AI can help us show something, but the reason it moves us will always come from people.
Philatz (Photo: Private album)
