Oscar and BAFTA Nominated Documentaries Coming Soon to ZagrebDox

This year’s ZagrebDox programme includes as many as six documentary films running for the prestigious Oscar and BAFTA awards. Straight from the list of Academy Award nominees in the best feature-length documentary film category are Free Solo, Hale County This Morning, This Evening and the already introduced Minding the Gap, joined by one short title – Black Sheep. The Oscar run includes the last year’s ZagrebDox winner, Of Fathers and Sons by Talal Derki.

Free Solo (dir. Elizabeth Vasarhely and Jimmy Chin) is National Geographic’s new documentary title, following climber Alex Honnold and his mission to conquer – without ropes or safety equipment – the 900 metres high vertical rock of El Capital in the Yosemite National Park, one of the biggest endeavours in the history of climbing. Before the Oscar and BAFTA nomination, Free Solo won the best documentary award at the 43rd Toronto International Film Festival, and ZagrebDox will screen it in the official Biography Dox section.Two other interesting American titles share the Oscar nominee list and the ZagrebDox line-up. One is the interesting film by RaMell Ross Hale County This Morhing, This Evening, showing intimate and simple moments from the lives of the African American community in Hale County, Alabama, painting an emotional experience of the historical South, and the other is the already announced Sundance docu-hit about skaters on a turning point in life, Minding the Gap, which has so far won over 48 awards at festivals across the world. Both films will be screened in international competition, which also includes a short film from the list of this year’s Oscar nominees Black Sheep by Ed Perkins, blurring the lines between documentary and fiction to ask the difficult and pertinent questions about race and identity. Who decides what is it that makes us what we are? What other compromises are we ready to make in order to blend in?

In addition to the Academy Awards, Free Solo is also nominated for a BAFTA opposite two other documentaries in this year’s ZagrebDox programme: They Shall Not Grow Old by Peter Jackson and Three Identical Strangers by Tim Wardle.Commemorating the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, the famous director Peter Jackson produced and directed They Shall Not Grow Old, a documentary about one of the biggest war conflicts in history, using remastered, sound-reconstructed and so far unpublished archive footage from the Imperial War Museum in London and BBC’s audio records. Don’t miss Peter Jackson’s new documentary in the official Masters of Dox section.Tim Wardle’s Three Identical Strangers is an international competition entry. The film focuses on one of the most incredible American cover page stories from the early 1980s. Three brothers, identical twins, were separated after birth and adopted by different families, only to meet by chance at the age of 19. Their reunion launches a chain of events that unravels an unusual secret bigger than their lives.