ZagrebDox 2015
Festival director Nenad Puhovski and his ZagrebDox team has announced its programme for the 11th edition – around 150 films in 16 sections. The Croatian festival runs February 22 to March 1, take a look at the (as always) inviting, well designed website, link below.
25 films in the international competition, great films waiting for the audience like Virpi Suutari’s “Garden Lovers”, Laurent Bécue-Renard’s “Of Men and War”, Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard’s “Rules of the Game” and “Tea Time” by Maite Alberdi. Bravo that ZagrebDox takes films like Laila Pakalnina’s “Hotel and a Ball” and Viestur Kairish “Pelican in the Desert” (photo), overseen by bigger documentary festivals. The latter is a masterpiece.
The festivals also has a section for controversial documentaries that “explores and expounds political, social, religious and sexual controversies”, a section for “state of affairs” that “question some of the most important issues and controversies of today, from the current changes in Greece and the fates of prominent information freedom fighters Swartz and Snowden, to environmental and economic manipulations”, (but “Citizenfour” is not there?), and a special one titled “Discover Russia at ZagrebDox”. Here is the text from the website:
In international competition we are introduced to the ‘Russian soul’ in the documentary Sounds of the Soul by Robin Dimet, who has always been fascinated with Russian people’s skilfulness at surviving in the wild liberal system. We also meet a community living in Svalka, a landfill near Moscow. Filmmaker Hanna Polak took 14 years to make it, covering the growing up of charismatic Yula in Something Better to Come.
Survival, albeit of a different kind, is the focus of a former war reporter who reported on the Chechen war for Russian television. Thirteen years later he moved to Kamchatka, where he films daily life on the island, beautiful shots of spawning salmon and fishermen doing their jobs. He is followed by Yulia Mironova’s camera – in Kamchatka – The Cure for Hatred she recorded how hard it is to escape the demons of war, not matter how much we run. The Russian knows that well, the man who changed three names, three political systems, three wives and three religions, who turned from the son of a famous Bosnian director into a classic Russian mobster. A documentary with fiction elements, Russian, by Damir Ibrahimović and Eldar Emrić is included in the regional competition.
Another face of Russia is revealed in the Teen Dox section, in the film Long.Black.Cloud Is Coming Down by Alexandra Likhacheva, portraying young Russians with a diploma in their hands and horizons wide open. Finally, we have already announced the latest work by the 3rd ZagrebDox winner Alina Rudnitskaya, Victory Day, from the State of Affairs section, exploring a new, homophobic chapter in the history of modern Russia.
