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