The eighth edition of ZagrebDox, the largest international documentary film festival in south-eastern Europe, will take place from 26 February to 4 March in Zagreb.
The organizers announced that the audience will have a chance to see more than 150 documentary stories from all over the world during the week-long festival.
This year's competition program of ZagrebDox includes 50 documentaries competing for the main festival awards, Big Stamps. There are 30 films in the international and 20 in regional competition.
Little Stamp is awarded to a film director of up to 35 years of age. Movies That Matter Award goes to a film that best promotes human rights. For the fifth year in a row, the audience choice award for the best film will be given by the festival’s general sponsor Hrvatski Telekom.
In adition to the competition programme, there are six other official film programmes on ZagrebDox: Musical Dox, Happy Dox, Controversial Dox, State of Affairs and – launched last year – Masters of Dox and Teen Dox.
The side programmes include several retrospectives: Baltic Documentaries retrospective (selected by Danish film expert Tue Steen Müller), Danish Film School (Den Danske Filmskole) retrospective (selected by Arne Bro, head of the Documentary Studio at DDF) and a retrospective of exploitation (often pseudo) documentaries focusing on sensationalist themes. These films, called Mondo, marked the 1960s.
In this year's author's retrospective the festival will present the internationally acclaimed and awarded independent U.S. filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt. Croatian retrospectives include the films of Fade In and the Author's Night is dedicated to film director Tomislav Radic.
“From its very beginning, ZagrebDox has been a place where the great Zagreb audience and filmmakers of various documentary approaches meet. The one thing all of them have always had in common is their desire to describe, understand and – at least a little bit – improve the world we live in,” said ZagrebDox Director Nenad Puhovski at the press conference.
Puhovski pointed out some of the documentaries to be shown at the ZagrebDox, including the fascinating intimate drama 'People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am' by Boris Gerrets, an animated human-rights documentary 'Green Wave' by Ali Samadi Ahadi and the beautifully photographed, socially committed film 'The Tiniest Place' by Tatiana Huezo.
The films of great masters like Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield will also have their Croatian premieres at the festival.
For the third year in a row, ZagrebDox will be taking place in Movieplex and Centar Kaptol auditoriums. Last year, the festival attracted 22,000 viewers.