The ninth edition of ZagrebDox, the biggest international documentary film festival in the region, takes place 24 February – 3 March at Zagreb’s Cineplexx Kaptol Centre cinema. These eight festival days will present more than 150 documentary films from all over the world.
In addition to the International and Regional Competition, a series of intriguing titles have settled in our popular official selections: Controversial Dox, State of Affairs, Happy Dox, Masters of Dox, Musical Globe, Teen Dox. This year’s new programme Biography Dox presents the life stories of fascinating and influential personalities who have differently marked the last decades: from Steve Jobs to sisters Louise and Martine Fokkens. The side programme includes a number of retrospectives, like the one of the outstanding Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky, as well as an evening dedicated to the Croatian director Vlatka Vorkapić.
After the Berlinale, ZagrebDox’s International Competition will host the most controversial film of the decade, American The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer. In the words of Werner Herzog, one of the producers alongside Errol Morris, this is a unique and unprecedented film in history! Oppenheimer takes the viewers into the world of Indonesian death squads which committed genocide in the mid-1960s and killed a million citizens, ethnic Chinese, in a single year. The filmmaker does that from a completely unusual point of view, by reconstructing the events – the retired killers shoot and repeat the scenes they had lived and “committed”. The Swiss documentary Winter Nomads by Manuel von Stürler received the European Film Academy award for best documentary and it portrays two shepherds who lead their herd of 800 sheep for several months through hundreds of kilometres of beautiful, but extremely changeable landscape.
The Controversial Dox programme will also screen a documentary film nominated for this year’s Academy Award, The Gatekeepers by Dror Moreh, focusing on six former heads of Shin Betam Israeli secret service. For the first time they publicly reveal many secrets and comment on their actions and decisions they had to make in the past.
The House I Live In, the best documentary at Sundance Film Festival, is a new film by Eugene Jarecki, the renowned American documentarian, and will be available to the audience in our Masters of Dox programme. The film was made in more than twenty US states and documents a series of powerful and grim tales about the American “war on drugs”: from dealers to grieving mothers, from narcotics agents to senators, from prisoners to federal judges. The “war” balance sheet: 45 million arrests, which makes the US the largest incarcerator in the world. With no results.
Peter Radovich Jr., a Croat residing in America, CBS sports creative director and winner of more than 20 Emmy Awards, is coming to ZagrebDox with Game of Honor, in which he portrays the so far unseen world of football at an American military academy. One of the producers of this film, which has so far won three Emmy Awards, is Mia Pećina. The film will be screened in the State of Affairs programme.
This year’s Regional Competition includes the world premiere of Strange Fruit by multimedia artist Ivan Faktor. It conveys an introspective moment of an individual who becomes aware of certain events that immediately require our presence.
This year ZagrebDox also includes an extremely rich educational programme for film professionals, ZagrebDox Pro, whose aim is to stimulate collaboration in South-East Europe and enable mutual acquaintance and recognition between global, European, regional and local documentary film scene.
