The Eighth Edition of ZagrebDox with New Visual Identity and More than 150 Documentaries!

This year's edition of ZagrebDox, the largest international documentary film festival in the region, will take place from 26 February to 4 March in Movieplex in Kaptol Centar. For the eighth year in a row, our audience will have a chance to see more than 150 documentary stories from all over the world.

This year's competition program of ZagrebDox includes 50 documentaries competing for the main festival awards, Big Stamps; of these, 30 films are in the international and 20 in regional competition. Little Stamp is awarded to a film director of up to 35 years of age. Movies That Matter Award goes to a film that best promotes human rights. For the fifth year in a row, the audience choice award for the best film will be given by our general sponsor Hrvatski Telekom.

In adition to the competition program, there are six other official film programs on ZagrebDox: Musical Dox, Happy Dox, Controversial Dox, State of Affairs and – launched last year – Masters of Dox and Teen Dox. The side programs include several retrospectives: Baltic Documentaries retrospective (selected by Danish film expert Tue Steen Müller), Danish Film School (Den Danske Filmskole) retrospective (selected by Arne Bro, head of the Documentary Studio at DDF) and a retrospective of exploitation (often pseudo) documentaries focusing on sensationalist themes. These films, called Mondo, marked the 1960s. In this year's author's retrospective we will present the internationally acclaimed and awarded independent U.S. filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose filmography includes more than 25 films that have won him around one hundred awards. Croatian retrospectives include the films of Fade In and the Author's Night is dedicated to film director Tomislav Radić.

This year's ZagrebDox is taking place in times pregnant with problems, wars, insurgencies, crises… in one word, in the times when most of the mankind has lost faith (or, perhaps, illusion) in the meaning, prosperity, future. Naturally, documentarists follow the events. Every one of them in their own way, using their own esthetics – and ethics. From its very beginning, ZagrebDox has been a place where the great Zagreb audience and filmmakers of various documentary approaches meet. The one thing all of them have always had in common is their desire to describe, understand and – at least a little bit – improve the world we live in. This is why I am glad that our audience will this year have a chance to see the fascinating intimate drama 'People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am' by Boris Gerrets, an animated human-rights documentary 'Green Wave' by Ali Samadi Ahadi or the beautifully photographed, socially committed film 'The Tiniest Place' by Tatiana Huezo. The audience will also be able to see world premieres of the films of our seasoned documentarists Dana Budisavljević, Silvestar Kolbas and Branko Ištvančić, as well as those of young authors, Đuro Gavran and Morana Komljenović, announced ZagrebDox Director Nenad Puhovski.

The films of great masters like Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield will have their Croatian premieres. Fans of musical dox will also be satisfied. Happy Dox will put many a smile on the audience's faces and teenagers can count for some great films, too. The 'controversial state of affairs' (to blend two program titles together) will help us better understand Greece's debt crisis and the conspiracy because of which light bulbs of today last shorter than the ones from a hundred years ago. We will learn how to turn our pickup truck into a mobile farm. Secrets of modern-day liberal capitalism and fake diplomats will be revealed for us, together with the conspiracies of major food producers and modern eco-terrorists. We will also be reminded on the war-time meetings of Tuđman and Milošević. And finally – in Eric Black's film 'Heart of Sky - Heart of Earth' that talks about the world of the Mayas – we will learn that 2012 is not the end of the world, but only the end of a time cycle. At least some light at the end of the tunnel!, concluded Nenad Puhovski.

For the third year in a row, ZagrebDox will be taking place in Movieplex and Centar Kaptol auditoriums. As can be seen from the fact that the last year's festival screenings had 22,000 viewers, Zagreb has a great audience for documentary films, said Sanja Borčić, Assistant Director of ZagrebDox.

In addition to numerous new documentary films, the new visual identity of the festival and its web pages will also be presented to the public. After four years we decided to introduce certain changes. This is why we invited proposals for the redesign of our visual identity. We were very satisfied with the quality of some 50 solutions we had received. We are grateful to all those who submitted their works. We chose a solution that, in our opinion, best reinterprets our visual identity, introduces a fresh approach to our image and changes the way ZagrebDox will be presenting itself to the public. It is the work of two designers, Lidija Novosel and Mia Vučić. We would also like to present our new web pages that have undergone structural and visual changes. The new look of the pages is also a work of the two designers. Their ideas were carried out by the Effectiva Studio programmers, explained Sanja Borčić.

This year, screenings will again take place in all five Movieplex auditoriums. Admission will be free for those in Auditorium No. 2, where films from the official competition without Croatian subtitles will be shown. The interest for these screenings is traditionally huge, so booking tickets for them in advance will not be possible. Price of tickets for other screenings has not been changed for years: it is HRK 20.00 for daytime and HRK 25.00 for night screenings. Also, a program called The Best of Fest will take place on Sunday, 4 March. The tickets for it will cost HRK 35.00, said Sanja Borčić. This is the sixth year in a row that we have Hrvatski Telekom as our general sponsor. The festival is also supported by the City of Zagreb, City Office for Education, Culture and Sports, HAVC, MEDIA (European fund supporting film festivals), Media Desk Croatia, DHL, U.S. Embassy, Austrian Cultural Forum, Rezolucija, AVC Zagreb Sony, Press Clipping, Stella Artois, Hotel Astoria and many others, including Croatia Airlines and Kutjevo for the first time. We would particularly like to express our gratitude to our host, Centar Kaptol and Movieplex, because our cooperation is getting better and better every year, added Sanja Borčić.