No one’s sitting in the main hall yet, but no one’s exactly waiting either. Teams are moving fast, speakers are landing, last details are getting prepared in real time. The space is shifting into what this thing actually is: a place where the industry drops the performance and acts like a community for a few days.
Foto: Vana Katančić
In the next stretch, several thousand people from five countries will pass through — arriving for similar reasons, leaving with completely different outcomes. Ideas, deals, friendships, side projects, things that didn’t exist a week ago. Across three days and nights, the festival expands across ten locations with 100+ sessions and experiences. Some are big and scheduled, some happen because two people didn’t stop talking.
Foto: Vana Katančić
More than 200 speakers and performers are stepping in. 170 jury and committee members are deciding what actually counts as the best work. Over 150 partners are backing it, but not as decoration — as infrastructure, this doesn’t run without a lot of people building it.
Foto: Vana Katančić
At the same time, the physical space is being rebuilt around it. The main hall goes fully digital this year — walls turned into screens, 300+ square meters of LED, a new stage. It sounds like a spec sheet, but it’s not about that, it’s about giving the work, the conversations and the people behind them a setting that doesn’t undersell them.
Foto: Vana Katančić
Yes, there’s a program, there always is. But that’s never been the whole story — it’s what happens in between that keeps people coming back — conversations that start casually and end up changing something, coffee that turns into collaboration, late nights that don’t feel optional.
This year pushes that part further and the city becomes part of it: guided walks through Rovinj, beach sessions with Porto Morto, helicopter flights if you want perspective, tattoos if you want a reminder that you were here.
That’s usually the tipping point; someone who wasn’t planning to come sees what’s building and changes their mind. Because once it clicks how much is happening in one place — and how many people are actually in it — skipping it starts to feel like missing something you’ll hear about later.
Foto: Vana Katančić
Some things will stay accessible. With Confiva, participants get recordings of main stage talks and award shows — to revisit what hit or catch what they skipped.
But the part that matters most doesn’t translate to video. The people, the energy, the reason this keeps growing — and still somehow feels like itself.
Check the program. Join if you’re in.
