Nine Intriguing Titles in Controversial Dox Section

The Controversial Dox section includes the Croatian premiere of the latest film from Irena Škorić, which earned her the best documentary award at the BaNeFF festival in Stockholm. Unwanted Heritage is a film about the monuments to the People's Liberation Movement – thousands of which were built in the former state between 1945 and 1990 – and the citizens' view of this valuable heritage. The original score was composed by Ivo Josipović. Irena Škorić won the HT Audience Award at ZagrebDox 2010 for The Destiny of Line 13 and at ZagrebDox 2014 for Dear Lastan!.

Another title turned to the past is Down There by Đorđe Čenić and Hermann Peseckas, the winner of the Social Awareness Award at the Crossing Europe Festival in 2016. Down There is an autobiographic journey across the past. The authors deconstruct the mechanisms of indoctrination of Yugoslav guest workers in Austria, and the mine field of personal and family past is also trodden by the Dutch filmmakers born and raised in Sarajevo, Lidija Zelović. In My Own Private War this director and former TV reporter returns to Sarajevo after 20 years to face old hatreds and new nationalist aggression.

The intriguing French-Italian film Liberami by Federica di Giacomo, the winning title in the Horizons section of Venice Film Festival, is a story about the increasing practice of exorcism in Italy. Following an exorcist priest, the audience gets an insight into the practice that unmasks the disturbing and ridiculous contrasts between tradition and modern habits, between the sacred and the profane. The matters of human soul are the focus of another controversial doc providing a discreet but also a shrewd insight into the everyday life of patients in a Siberian mental institution. Where is the human soul? In the heart, in the brain, or someplace else, wonders an elderly doctor, one of the protagonists of Icon, directed by the Polish author Wojciech Kaspersky. The film won the FIPRESCI Award at Krakow Film Festival, and Kaspersky garnered the Golden Hobby Horse for best film director.

Mike Day's Danish-British documentary The Islands and the Whales is a story about sea bird and whale hunting in the Faroe Islands. Through a story about an isolated culture based on food and folklore, the film offers a terrifying look on the state of our complex ecosystem. Mike Day won the best new director award at Hot Docs in Canada in 2016. Nature, but the simulated kind, is the subject of the short essay documentary Nature: All Rights Reserved by Sebastian Mulder.

Two controversial documentaries focus on destroyed families. It's Getting Dark by Olga Kravets is a portrayal of five Russian families and a glance on a political prisoner. The film provides a unique insight into the daily lives of the families of people convicted of treason or drug possession, but the only thing they did was that they at some point expressed a critique against the government politics. The French-Belgian film My Daughter Nora by Jasna Krajinović is a story about the mother of a girl who went to Syria at the age of 18 to take part in the holy war against the infidels and the agony of a woman trembling over the uncertain fate of her daughter.