ZagrebDox on Tour

ZagrebDox's documentary titles no longer reside only in our capital city. In cooperation with Croatian Independent Cinemas Network, our most important documentary film festival goes to a number of Croatian cities with three films that marked this year's edition of the Festival. April in France, Smiling Georgia and Happy Campers won over the large audience of the 20th ZagrebDox with ease, and now they will try to do the same in Bjelovar, Daruvar, Klanjec, Labin, Novska, Pula, Rijeka, Samobor, Slatina, Varaždin, Zabok and... once again in Zagreb!

April In France is a documentary about April, a 5-year-old English girl, who is unhappy with her family’s relocation to France. After initial time in Paris, spent in the lockdown, she moves to a small medieval village in southwest France where her great-grandfather used to live. Visiting the local cemetery, she thinks people there are just asleep. She talks to her great-grandfather and strongly believes that he might eventually come back to be with her. She will make several wishes for this purpose, in church and in the Pyrenees mountains, waiting for a falling star, as she has seen in Pinocchio. While waiting for him she meets his former friends. With them she will open up to the world, discover her inner self and in turn change the world of the adults around her forever. 

Smiling Georgia asks the simple question: what are the costs of the half-truths that politicians tell? In 2012, the Georgian president wanted to make the nation smile. In the race for reelection, the incumbent's party was promising subsidized dental care to the country’s least well off. Across the land, state medical practitioners began removing rotten teeth with the promise of replacements in the months that followed — then the president lost. Through interviews with those worst affected by that campaign, Smiling Georgia tells a story about the transience of power, the things politicians will say to keep it, and the people who are always left to pay the bill. It’s also a film of quiet defiance: with or without the politicians’ carelessness, these are a people who never forgot how to smile.

Happy Campers are situated in a waterfront campground off the coast of Virginia where they spend their summers living spitting distance apart in rust-bitten RVs. They chuckle about paying modest rent for a million-dollar location, but what makes them the luckiest people in the world is more than just stunning sunsets. Beneath a few trailer park stereotypes lies an unlikely utopia where neighbors help each other out and share whatever they have. Loneliness and isolation are inconceivable. Sadly, their affordable paradise has been sold. The residents brace for eviction and the loss of relationships that span generations. As the familiar narrative of displacement plays out once again, they hold tight to their final days in the sun. The more affluent crowd that takes their place will never be as wealthy.

Cinemas where ZagrebDox on Tour will reside for the weekend are: Art-kino (Rijeka), Dokukino KIC (Zagreb), Kino "30. svibnja" (Daruvar), Kino Gaj (Varaždin), Kino Labin, Kino Novska, Kino Slatina, KinoValli (Pula ), Kino Zabok, Klajn House (Klanjec), Kulturni i multimedijski centar Bjelovar and Pop up Art Kino (Samobor).

The films will be in the repertoire on June 15 and 16.