Zagreb, 21 February – This year’s ZagrebDox will screen a total of more than forty Croatian documentaries. Dox events include ten local premieres, six of them in the regional competition: Five Women by Tomislav Perica, How’s Everyone at Home? by Kaja Šišmanović, Strange Fruit by Ivan Faktor, Gangster of Love by Nebojša Slijepčević, Two Furnaces for Udarnik Josip Trojko by Goran Dević and Verdict by Đuro Gavran. The Factumentaries section features Cheese and Cream by Kristina Leko and three films made within the documentary course at the Academy of Dramatic Art: Park of Loveby Lana Kosovac, Viktorija by Silva Ćapin and Fed Up by Tomislav Jelinčić. The regional competition will screen Templeby Ivan Vuković and Real Man’s Film by Nebojša Slijepčević. Factumentaries feature Čedo by Nikola Strašek, the Musical Globe Disclosing Afion by Marko Dimić and Jazz Apartment by Biljana Čakić-Veselič and Tomislav Pavleka, while Happy Dox includes Stanislav Tomić’s Nine.
Forts-three titles in the regional and international competition run for the main festival awards, Big Stamps. The best will be decided at the discretion of the international jury chaired by the successful Croatian filmmaker Vlatka Vorkapić, in addition to other two members: film critic and journalist Dragan Rubeša and Lithuanian director and producer Audrius Stonys, who won the international jury’s special mention at the 8th ZagrebDox.
The regional jury consists of Hanka Kastelicová, executive producer of HBO Europe’s documentary department, the successful Croatian producer Siniša Juričić and Bosnian and Herzegovinian director Ines Tanović, who won the Big Stamp in regional competition in 2012. The Little Stamp is awarded to a filmmaker up to the age of 35, and at this year’s ZagrebDox the decision will be reached by the youth jury consisting of: Dick Fontaine, Head of Documentary Department at NFTS, Beaconsfield, Polish director Marta Minorowicz, who won the last year’s jury special mention, and Croatian filmmaker Tonći Gaćina.
The Movies That Matter award is given to the film which best promotes human rights, and will be awarded at the discretion of a jury consisting of theorist and philosopher Srećko Horvat, Oksana Sarkisova, programmer at the International Human Rights Film Festival Verzio in Budapest, and Sandra Benčić, head of programmes at the Centre for Peace Studies. This year a new side programme was designed, Phone Dox, and the best of them will be judged by producer Vera Robić-Škarica, Bosnia and Herzegovinian director Nedžad Begović and director Dalibor Matanić.
We are particularly pleased to present a number of filmmakers who will visit this year’s ZagrebDox. After receiving two awards in Berlin, American director Joshua Oppenheimer is arriving to Zagreb with his film The Act of Killing. To many people’s view this is the most controversial film of the decade, also the winner of CPH:Dox. The international competition also features several filmmakers coming to Zagreb: Polish director Janusz Mrozowski, the author of Bad Boy High Security Cell, following a young prison inmate fighting with life in a solitary confinement of a Polish high-security prison; filmmaking team Willem Timmers and Ilja Kok, whose film Framing the Other speaks about the differences between the Mursi people in southern Ethiopia and Dutch tourists; and Polish director Pavel Ziemilski, the author of Rogalik, whose camera toured numerous Polish homes.
From the regional competition we will host a number of filmmakers: Italian authors Alessandro Comodino (Summer of Giacomo) and Carl HIntermann (Dark Side of the Sun), Austrian director Ed Moschitz (Mamma Illegal), Serbian directors Irena Fabri (Awakening) and Ivana Mladenović (Turn Off the Lights), Bosnian and Herzegovinian directors Nedžad Begović (Two Shoelaces Under One Roof) and Nejra Latić Hulušić (Her Cinema Love), Slovenian filmmaker Urša Menart (There Was Once the Land of Hard-working People) and the team Lena Müller and Dragan von Petrović (Dragan Wende).
At the festival we will be joined by the acclaimed Russian documentarian Victor Kossakovsky, to whom we dedicate this year’s retrospective. In addition to familiarising with his film work, the audience will also get a chance to participate in his master class. Aside from him, the festival will be attended by another two masters of documentary whose new works will be screened in the Masters of Dox programme: the renowned cinematographer and director John Appel (Wrong Tim Wrong Place) and Serbian director of many fiction and documentary films Želimir Žilnik (Pirika on Film).
The Controversial Dox programme screens ten films and hosts three directors. Austrian Friedrich Moser in his film The Brussels Business takes the audience on a tour through the corridors of power in the largest economy of the world, the European Union, Dutch filmmaker Marc Schmidt in Matthew’s Laws films his autistic friend, and Bosnian and Herzegovinian director Dino Mustafić in An Artist’s View on the Past reminisces with artists from across the former Yugoslavia and predicts the future. Swedish director Folke Ryden, whose Prize of Gold – a film about the price of athletic success – is screened in State of Affairs, is also presenting his film in person. The Dutch team of authors Gabriëlle Provaas and Robert Schröder is coming, too, and their film Meet the Fokkens, a portrayal of two twins who worked for more than 40 years as prostitutes in Amsterdam’s Red Light District, is presented in Biography Dox.
Two filmmakers whose works are presented in the Happy Dox section are also joining us: Latvian director Inese Klava whose Documentarian depicts the efforts of a director to make a stubborn Latvian woman living on the edge of a picturesque swamp the protagonist of her film, and Englishman James Newton, the author of Janapar, a film about a loner whose decides to travel three continents on a bicycle.
The authors of three films from the Teen Dox programme are visiting Zagreb: Brazilian director Theo Solnik who directed Anna Pavlova Lives in Berlin, Portuguese Bruno Moraes Cabral, the director of Rite of Passage, andthe director of Small World, the Spaniard Marcel Barrena and his protagonist Albert Casals, a young man who despite his handicap made his dream come true and in 200 days travelled 30 thousand kilometres. Our festival guest is also the Dutch author of the musical documentary Karsu, Mercedes Stalenhoef, accompanied by the film protagonist, 22-year-old Karsu Dönmez or the Dutch Norah Jones, a talented jazz songwriter who grew up in a Turkish family in Amsterdam. Karsu will have a concert on Thursday, 28 February, at ZagrebDox’s festival centre.
The opening ceremony of the festival takes place on Sunday, 24 February at 8pm, with a screening of Gangster of Love by Nebojša Slijepčević about a marriage broker from Imotski who left a job as a parquet layer to fully dedicate to matchmaking between lonely men and women. The screening will be attended by the film protagonist Nediljko Babić.
