ZagrebDox 2012
A wise festival person once said that it takes 8 years to build a festival. A look at the 8th edition of ZagrebDox confirms this assumption. This international documentary film festival has found itself. It is professionally organised, communicates very well its programme profile online and in book print, there are posters and banners all over the city inviting people to watch documentaries, and the programme itself is well structured with competition programmes, retrospectives, ”happy dox”, ”controversial dox”, ”teen dox”, industry activities etc.
And as a visitor the growth of the festival is very visible. For three years the festival, moving from the university area, has had Centar Kaptol as its venue. It is a big shopping centre that includes a Movieplex with five cinemas that for this week all run documentaries, surrounded by cafés in- and outside, plus restaurants, and a ten minute walk down the pedestrian street to the main square of Zagreb. Of course it is ambitious to have five parallel screenings, and some films suffer audience-wise, where other halls are full, especially for the night screenings.
Atmosphere is fine and friendly, and festival director and founder Nenad Puhovski walks around greeting people in his own jovial manner. His luck is also, he will probably claim that he organised that as well, that spring slowly is coming to a city that a week ago was full of snow.
