Dalibor Barić is a filmmaker and visual artist whose work brings together analog film, experimental animation, speculative fiction, and AI-assisted world-building. His films function as perceptual laboratories—cinematic ecosystems in which memory, texture, and subconscious signals shape the narrative more than traditional plot.

His early work involved cut-out montage, the recomposition of found footage, and handcrafted surrealism, all aimed at revealing unseen layers of reality. This sensibility evolved into large-scale conceptual worlds such as Silence Fiction, Depth Department, Dream On/Dream Off, Object-Oriented Fiction, and Speculative Mood Fiction—frameworks that combine storytelling, design language, and philosophical architecture.

Barić’s films regularly screen at international festivals, and twice entered the Oscar race:

– The Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus (shortlisted for the 2021 Academy Awards)

– All Operators Are Currently Unavailable (shortlisted for the 2026 Academy Awards)

Alongside his filmmaking, he creates AI-generated albums, images, graphic novels, and music videos. His recent AI-assisted work treats machine intelligence not as a tool, but as an “ambient collaborator”—a parallel sensory organ that expands perception and supports processes of recombination, hallucination, and emergent storytelling.

His visual language draws on influences ranging from tokusatsu pulp and retro-futurist manuals to modernist design, experimental cinema, cult animation, noir atmospheres, and glitch aesthetics. These elements come together in a distinctive hybrid that is tactile, dreamlike, philosophical, playful, and profoundly cinematic.