November 2, 2019 – One hundred films, 12 programs, 11 days, 8 Zagreb venues and 20 cities all over Croatia, is this year’s Zagreb Film Festival in numbers.
T.portal writes that the 17th edition of the Zagreb Film Festival opens on November 7 at Lauba and will last until November 17 at various locations across the capital, including the Tuskanac Cinema, KIC Hall, Museum of Contemporary Art, Dubrava National University, Travno Cultural Center, Croatian Music Institute, F22 – New Academic Stage and HUB385.
Zagreb Film Festival Director Boris T. Matic opened the press conference at the Croatian Music Institute and announced that the visual identity of this year’s festival is dedicated to the Europa Cinema and its distinctive colorful neon lights., which closed to the public just a few months ago.
“We are only seventeen years old, feeling younger and younger, our colleagues from other places have received us, and we are extremely fortunate that our sponsors, regardless of the whole situation, firmly believed in us and stayed with us,” Matic said at the press conference.
This year’s festival will last a record eleven days in order to screen the hundred films and honor contracts with sponsors and patrons. ‘We are a bit displaced and we were on our knees, but with our heads up and our hearts full, we are moving on. We hope the audience will be happy,” Matic said, referring to the painful closing of the Europa Cinema.
This year’s Golden Pram program will showcase 11 feature films, 10 international and 10 Croatian short films from the Checkers program. The competition brings as many as four Oscar nominees – Russian, Belgian, Colombian and Danish, the winner of the Sundance Audience Award, the Best Debut of Cannes Criticism Week, the winner of the Sarajevo Film Festival and others.
The program also gives insight into the five most important European cinematographies – France, Italy, Germany, United Kingdom and Spain, boasts a children’s program, ‘My First Film’, which presents debut works by great directors who have passed away in the last two years, ‘LUX Film Days’, ‘Fragments from the Exile’, ‘Two Berlins’ and ‘Festivals from the Spotlight’. You can explore the Zagreb Film Festival program in its entirety here.
Richard Breskovic, director of the Marketing Division at Hrvatski Telekom, said they were proud to be a part of the festival, which is of great importance for Croatian cinema and Croatian culture. “We are not someone who gives up and is afraid, the festival has good content and that is why we continue to support it,” he said. Hrvatski Telekom is the general sponsor of the festival and, traditionally, delivers exclusive film content through the MAXtv platform with films from ZFF, and through the MAXtv To Go service.
As part of the Zagreb Film Festival program travels in November, part of the program will be shown in 20 Croatian cities, including Bjelovar, Dubrovnik, Ivanec, Koprivnica, Prelog, Rijeka, Rovinj, Samobor, Slatina, Split, Šibenik, Varaždin, Velika Gorica, Zadar , Sv. Ivan Zelini, Hvar, Omiš, Bol, Podgora and Imotski.
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