Marko Gutić Mižimakov

Dragon Hunt is an experimental film inspired by Samuel R. Delany’s science fiction novel Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. A collaborative work in between the genres of queer science fiction, dance, and road film, Dragon Hunt is set in the weirdening landscape of the Dalmatian Hinterland. Loosely narrative, the film follows a transgenerational pair on a journey of “dragon hunting”. In Delany’s novel, dragon hunting functions as a ritual of reciprocal experience—a technology of peace allowing different species to inhabit another’s perception. Delany translated his experiences of cruising in pre-AIDS New York into a vision of interspecies sensory empathy. The flickering rhythms of the film seek to reify this concept through its structure and production method, using machine learning, choreography, and collaborative filmmaking. Animated by the conch shell’s sound and shaped through somatic practice, mimicry, and media translation, Dragon Hunt explores mutual transformability as a shared, relational process between bodies, technologies, and the landscape.