Refugees to figure large at this year’s ZagrebDox festival.
In accordance with past practice of covering the most current topics of our time, this year’s ZagrebDox Documentary Film Festival, which starts tomorrow, will focus part of its program on the subject of refugees, reports Vecernji List on February 20, 2016.
Among the films which deal with migrant issues is a Croatian film “Taste of Home”, directed by Martina Globočnik and inspired by the eponymous project which helps asylum seekers adapt to life in Croatia. The projects aid their faster integration, and local people get a chance to acquire new skills of developing friendships and knowledge about other cultures. The film follows Emina, who has turned her charity work into a culinary project for asylum seekers, Reda, a cook who is awaiting a decision on his fate, and Sandra, who seeks to find her place in the sun after fleeing from Syria. “Taste of Home” will be featured in the State of Affairs program.
The same program includes “Those” by Krisztina Meggyes, which shows what changes were caused by a refugee camp in a Hungarian town on the Austrian border. The citizens have strongly reacted to the setting up of the camp and founded an activist group which tried to chase the refugees away. The whole situation demonstrated another conflict – between the new, more affluent residents who wanted to remove the camp and older, original inhabitants who have accepted the presence of refugees.
The regional competition brings us “Abdul and Hamza” by director Marko Grba Singh about two young Somali migrants who have found temporary shelter in an abandoned house in the mountains near the Serbian-Romanian border. The film was awarded a prize at last year’s FIDMarseilles.
The competition will include another film on the same subject, “Flotel Europa” by Vladimir Tomić, a winner of several awards. The director recalls his own growing up on a huge ship called “Flotel Europa”, where he was accommodated as a 12-year-old together with his mother and brother by the Red Cross from Copenhagen, along with many other refugees from Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The special program “Children Changing the World” will feature a series of short films made in film workshops in refugee camps in Jordan and Austria. For almost all the students of the workshops that was their first encounter with the camera, and months of work have resulted in a series of interesting films. After the screening of the films, a special panel discussion on migrations will be organized, which will include Sepp Brudermann from Vienna, the head of the refugee film workshops, Ranko Ostojić, former Croatian Interior Minister, and Luka Juranić, the founder of the Are You Syrious? organization.
