ZagrebDox 2018 Program Ready

It’s the 14th edition of ZagrebDox that starts in the Croatian capital February 25th to run until March 4. And it is as usual well edited, the best of the best for the audience, with an international and a regional competition, and under the umbrella “Official Program” biographies, music documentaries, “happy dox” (seven this year out of 125 films!) and a masters program with films by Claude Lanzmann (“Napalm”, that I have not seen), Alex Gibney (“No Stone Unturned”, not seen), Joe Berlinger (“Intent to Destroy”, seen, good), Erik Gandini (“The Rebel Surgeon”, good, but is Gandini a master, sorry!) and Frederick Wiseman’s masterpiece “Ex Libris - the New York Public Library” - Wiseman who recently published that all his films will be available through an online service. Bravo! More sections can be discovered on the fine website of the festival that provides you with trailers to watch.

1386 films came in for consideration, 125 were taken, 21 of them for the

international competition, where it is a joy to see that the festival includes short films like the Belorussian director Aliaksei Paluyan’s “Country of Women” that charmed me at DOK Leipzig this year. A fine tribute to a young talent. It is reviewed on this site. As are of course Ai WeiWei’s “Human Flow”, Talal Derki’s “Of Fathers and Sons”, Marta Prus “Over the Limit”, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s “The Distant Barking of Dogs” and Arunas Matelis “Wonderful Losers: A Different World”.

From a Danish perspective nice to see that films praised by colleague Allan Berg in his Danish language reviews, “The Stranger” (“En fremmed flytter ind”) by Nicole Nielsen Horanyi is there as are Eva Mulvad’s “A Modern Man” and “Big Time” by Kaspar Astrup Schrøder about the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels.

I could go on with the name-dropping - and I do so with some fine titles from the Regional competition: of course the IDFA winner, Serbian Mila Turajlic’s “The Other Side of Everything” is there together with “A Woman Captured”, the shocking Hungarian film about modern slavery by Bernadett Tuza-Ritter and the charming Macedonian “Avec l’Amour” by Ilija Cvetkovski and Atanas Georgiev, not to forget the extraordinary “In Praise of Nothing” by Boris Mitic.

Masterclasses with Claude Lanzmann and Talal Derki… of course! And the ZagrebDox Pro with Leena Pasanen and Stefano Tealdi continues to be a strong element in the festival. Summing up. No objections!

http://zagrebdox.net/en