Retrospectives

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Author’s Night: Katarina Zrinka Matijević


A little less than a quarter of a century divides us from Katarina Zrinka Matijević’s triumphant debut at the 8th Croatian Film Days with her student documentary The Duel (1998) and the first Croatian Film Days Grand Prix ever given to a woman director. Since then, in only four, but four “rock-solid” directing-screenwriting endeavours, documentary filmmaker Matijević has journeyed from observing ordinary daily life and verité provocation of its strange or “marginal” protagonists, to essay-shaped self-observation. Each of them was characterised by a duel – existential or opposition – between a strict mother and a playful child (The Duel), between man and nature, between husband and wife (On Cows and Men, 2002), between a “republic” of marginal characters and the “official order” (Peščenopolis, 2003) – all the way to laying bare her own intimacy in a sophisticated visual homage to her Lika roots in the multi-award-winning documentary A Two Way Mirror (2016). We will take this journey once again with the director at her author’s night.



Diana Nenadić, Programme Selector

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Points of View


“If we can tell a film, why make it?” Iranian director Jafar Panahi asked himself in his “prisoner” piece This Is Not a Film. It is this documentary, made while Panahi was in house arrest, that inspired the making of The Year of the Everlasting Storm omnibus, which has been selected for this year’s ZagrebDox International Competition. Taking the pandemic, which dramatically changed everyone’s daily life, as the starting point, the film gathered a number of filmmakers whose short films in different ways and with different theme focuses registered fragments of this unusual time. The Points of View section features earlier titles by these filmmakers, different in terms of theme, form and poetics, but sharing the common belief in the power of the film medium to become a strong tool for revealing enigmatic and seemingly ephemeral aspects of everyday life, for creative resistance to repression and for opening new perspectives on the world we belong to.



Jelena Pašić, Programme Selector

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Želimir Žilnik: Fragments From Migrant Worker Opus


Active almost six decades, Želimir Žilnik is undoubtedly one of the key figures of politically and socially engaged film. Žilnik’s filmography, comprising around 70 titles, is a synonym for a consistent and uncompromising creative poetics, dedicated to documenting and challenging the political and social climate in post-war Europe and (post-)Yugoslav context. Over the course of several years spent in Munich, where he went after his films were assessed as ideologically unwanted in Yugoslavia, Žilnik continued to turn his camera to marginalised and disenfranchised subjects. Migrant workers whose life in a foreign country is subjected to a series of limitations, uncertain living conditions devoid of privileges and repressive methods of the regime are the topics of his independently produced films, important examples of Žilnik’s “cinema of Europe’s internal refugees”, as Pavle Levi calls it.