ZagrebDox 2016 Starts Tomorrow
… and runs until February 28. Here is a brief introduction text from the site of the festival: “A documentary about an ordinary family with extraordinary secrets, directed by Karen Guthrie, on Sunday, 21 February, opens the 12th edition of ZagrebDox, this year again featuring many burning and timeless issues in more than 160 films – from famous titles to numerous world premieres.”
Festival director is Nenad Puhovski, film director, producer and professor – and every year the editor-in-chief of a festival that in many ways lives up to a classical public service model that we see less and less of in television and in the printed press. There are sections in the programme that deal with the refugee crisis and with ”extremisms, especially those motivated by religion: anti-Semitism and Orthodox faith in Russia, as well as Islamism in the West.” And there is ”The Russians Are Coming to 12th ZagrebDox”, a section for biographies, music, one which is called ”state of affairs”, one ”controversial dox” – very inviting and clear communication to the audience, I guess, whereas festival travellers/documentary connaisseurs will appreciate retrospectives of directors like Erik Gandini and Nino Kirtadze. In other words, the festival is edited, in a very competent manner.
Of course there is also two competition programmes, an international and a regional. And for me, who was part of the beginning of the industry event, a ZagrebDoxPro: what a big pleasure to see how this event has developed to not only being a training and pitching session but also have masterclasses and a fine amount of television people and distributors present. I understand that this is because of the support from Creative Europe MEDIA, a good investment indeed from the EU.
To give you an idea of films to be shown, let me mention five films that have been written about on this site: ”Don Juan” by Jerzy Sladkowski”, ”My Love, Don’t Cross that River” by Mo-young Jin, ”Twilight of a Life” by Sylvain Biegeleisen, ”Train to Adulthood” by Klara Trencsenyi and ”Ukrainian Sheriffs” by Roman Bondarchuk.
Photo: Marlon Brando and Nenad Puhovski.
