Croatian Films in the Program of the 18th ZagrebDox

In the regional competition of the 18th ZagrebDox, five new works by Croatian authors are expected to premiere. These are  Vedrana Pribačić’s Bigger than Trauma, Davor Sanvincenti’s Places We'll Breathe, Goran Dević’s The Building, Ante Zlatko Stolica’s Babajanja and Mlungu - The White King by David Lušičić.      

Two films in which Croatia participates as a minority co-producer also compete for the best regional film: Four Seasons in a Day by Belgian director Annabel Verbeke and The Cars We Drove into Capitalism of the Bulgarian author duo Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov, while the Author’s Night belongs to director Katarina Zrinka Matijević, president of this year’s international jury, with a selection of films curated by Diana Nenadić.          

In Bigger than Trauma, Vedrana Pribačić follows the everyday life of three women living with the trauma of rape from the Croatian War of Independence, connecting with their deepest truths during the strengthening programme.      

Places We'll Breathe is an audiovisual essay that advocates imagination through a travelogue of constructed and anonymous landscapes. Stories interweave on the crossroads of visual, auditive and expressed, speaking about loss, quest, presence, wokeness, responsibility, expectation and freedom.      

Goran Dević (The Building) is returning to his native Sisak, recording in a week the life of a building built 60 years ago for the workers of the once extremely important industrial plant of the former Yugoslavia – the Sisak Iron Mill.       

In Babajanja, a short essay documentary with horror elements, Stolica confronts a mysterious woman, a key figure in his childhood fears.      

In the focus of Lušičić’s film Mlungu - The White King is the protagonist of the largest drug seizure in South African history – a Croatian sailor arrested for smuggling 230 kilograms of cocaine in his cabin en route from Argentina to Europe.      

Four Seasons in a Day by Belgian director Annabel Verbeke (Hot Docs Award for Best Upcoming Author and Award for Best Achievement at New York Film Week) follows a ferry that transports passengers across the Northern Ireland-Ireland border questioning the notion of national identities.       

A similar question, but from a completely different point of view – through the common passion of a whole range of characters towards old socialist cars – is dealt with by the film The Cars We Drove into Capitalism of the Bulgarian author duo Boris Missirkov and Georgi Bogdanov.           

The Author’s Night belongs to director Katarina Zrinka Matijević who - a little less than a quarter of a century ago - debuted at the 8th Croatian Film Days with her student documentary Duel (1998) which won the first Croatian Film Days Grand Prix ever given to a woman director. Since then, documentary filmmaker Matijević, in words of the programme's selector Diana Nenadić, "has journeyed from observing ordinary daily life and verité provocation of its strange or “marginal” protagonists, to essay-shaped self-observation". We will take this journey once again with the director at her author’s night, through films Duel, On Cows and Men (2002), and A Two Way Mirror (2016).