Can documentaries change the world? – 20th ZagrebDox starts today

The project, which was started two decades ago by a group of documentary enthusiasts spearheaded by Nenad Puhovski, and which has been visited by 350,000 visitors to date, will be opened by a film from the Happy Dox section, Smiling Georgia. Director Luka Beradze takes us to a sleepy Georgian village, introduces us to its inhabitants and shows that it is rarely worth believing the promises of populist politicians and voting for purely selfish reasons. In a broader context, Smiling Georgia is a film that raises questions about the value of ordinary people in the eyes of political leaders. One of ZagrebDox’s most popular programme sections brings us a total of four feelgood movie titles that will convince us, among other things, that even a toothless smile is still a smile. In addition to Beradze’s film, which won special awards at CinéDOC and Tbilisi IFF, as part of the Happy Dox segment we can also expect David Boaretto’s documentary, April in France (St Louis IFF, Thessaloniki IDF, DocUtah IFF), which brings us closer to the magical and wonderful world of perspectives of the five-year-old girl April. Winner of the Special Jury Award at DOC NYC Happy Campers, directed by Amy Nicholson, is a beautifully told documentary about working-class Americans whose happy summers in a Virginia camp are interrupted – by the march of capitalism, when a private entrepreneur takes over valuable land, which represents a lot more than a vacation place the protagonists of this film. We will find out if we can measure happiness in the film Agent of Happiness, directed by Arun Bhattarai and Dorottya Zurbó, which was shown at Sundance FF and CPH:DOX, among many other festivals, before ZagrebDox. The filmmakers transform the act of measuring happiness into a cinematic journey that takes us beyond the charts and shows us the thoughts and souls of the people of Bhutan.

As part of the Festival Hits section, nine titles will be shown, mostly shown and awarded at the most important documentary film festivals. Elvis Lenić’s film, Ship, which won the top prize at the Jihlava IDFF, is a monument to socialist workers’ collectives and an extensive, deeply researched and visually stunning depiction of the Pula shipyard Uljanik, whose rise and fall reflect the political fate of the former Yugoslavia. Mariam Chachia and Nik Voigt visited almost all relevant documentary film festivals with their film Magic Mountain, and the film was declared the best at Docs Barcelona. It takes us back to Georgia, where we open the Pandora’s box of the Georgian past – the palace called Abastumani. The Swedish documentary Hypermoon is the third part of director Mia Engberg’s Belleville trilogy, filmed at the time when the director received an unexpected medical diagnosis. Not knowing how much time she has left, Mia embarks on a journey into her own past and makes a film she believed would be her last. A Palestinian-Norwegian film that won the award as best documentary at the recent Berlinale, as well as the audience award at CPH:DOX, No Other Land is signed by the Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and it was created in the darkest and most terrible times, as an act of creative resistance to apartheid and as a search for equality and justice. Another film awarded at the Berlinale as the best short documentary, Silk Threads directed by Michelle Keserwany and Noel Keserwany ‘weaves a thread’ between West and East and the contemporary migrant experience of women who move from troubled Lebanon to modern Paris, offering an empathetic portrait of female solidarity, friendships and consolations. The short documentary that comes to Dox with the award of the most prestigious IDFA documentary festival, At That Very Moment, Rita Pauls and Federica Luis Tachella shows us short clips of the youth of a boy who tries to understand the reality around him by recording his surroundings with a camera. Multiple award-winning documentary An Asian Ghost Story directed by Bo Wang examines the role of Hong Kong as a space that mediates and heals the connection between different worlds, and the Danish documentary The Mountains (HotDocs, Visions du Réel) by Christian Einshøj is a story about the disintegration of what is most important in a person’s life, his family, and about all the ways in which we escape, instead of talking about what hurts—as well as the redemption that can follow if we finally break the silence. What can happen when our privacy is not respected? Another title from a rich festival life, Jialing Zhang’s Total Trust, which also won a special mention at Sheffield IDF, takes China as a mirror and warns of the increasing use of surveillance tools around the world – even in democratic countries.

The topic of human relationship to the environment and nature is also represented at ZagrebDox this year, and the Green Dox section brings us four important documentaries that deal with today’s unavoidable topic of ecology. Tradition in many countries dictates that the new year is ushered in with fireworks, but for animals, New Year’s Eve is a real nightmare. And a Happy New Year, by Sebastian Mulder won Best Youth at IDFA Documentary award, and sends a message louder than fireworks. French workers who clean nuclear reactors are exposed to high levels of radiation. Kilian Armando Friedrich and Tizian Stromp Zargari in their film Nuclear Nomads (Berlinale, Dokufest) show with impressive images the path that workers cross from one nuclear power plant to another, risking their health in the name of a better life. Mighty Afrin: In the Time of Floods, by Angelos Rallis won numerous festival awards (Thessaloniki IDF, Jihlava IFF) and follows a 12-year-old girl Afrin who, after another flood on the muddy island where she lives, embarks on a journey to the heart of Bangladesh in an attempt to track down her father. Along the way, she witnesses the difficult life of street orphans in Dhaka who struggle to survive by scavenging through garbage, and this experience forces her to grow up suddenly. Afrin’s island is not the only victim of climate change. As the Tide Comes In, by Juan Palacios and Sofie Husum Johannesen (IDFA, Gothenburg FF) takes us to the small Danish island of Mandø in the Wadden Sea, where climate change poses a serious existential threat. Nevertheless, the last island farmer, whose family has lived there for eight generations, does not give up in the face of the impending disaster. He refuses to build a life elsewhere and hopes to find a woman who will run the farm together with him, and the gloomy fate of the islanders, shown through humorous everyday situations, affects all of us in a way.

In the Factumentary section, three documentaries produced by Factum will be shown. Nikica Marović directed the film Literary Groupie about the Croatian writer, journalist and columnist Željko Špoljar and his increasingly well-known alter-ego Pavle Svirac, who writes under the pseudonym Literary Groupie. The Zagreb house at 35 Kraljevec has been the home of numerous prominent individuals in the fields of artistic creation and social activities for almost half a century, so top-quality books, film scripts, photographs, illustrations, comics, music, plays, films were created in it... Following the destinies of its tenants scattered around the world, Pero Kvesić’s the House in Kraljevec (DokuFest, Liburnia FF) tells us about the past, but also the present. Due to the author’s illness, the film was completed by co-screenwriter and editor Vesna Biljan Pušić and producer Nenad Puhovski. An autobiographical documentary directed by Silvestar Kolbas, Our Children asks all those questions about love, mutual influences, attitudes and feelings that we all ask ourselves when we think about relationships within the closest family circle. It is a new, deeply intimate work by one of our most important contemporary documentarians.

Tickets can be purchased in presale and during the Festival at the box office of the Kaptol Boutique Cinema (Kaptol Centre, Nova Ves 17), at the ticket machines in the lobby of the cinema and online at www.kaptolcinema.hr

ZagrebDox takes place with the support of the City of Zagreb, Croatian Audiovisual Centre, Kultura nova Foundation, Croatian Film Directors Guild and the City of Zagreb Tourist Board.