ZagrebDox will take place from 26 February to 5 March.
In addition to traditional documentaries, this year’s ZagrebDox Film Festival will include several films which approach their topics with a combination of documentary and fictional elements, reports tportal.hr on February 18, 2017.
One of the films in the programme, defined as an “art docu-thriller”, is an award-winning American film “God Knows Where I Am” by Todd and Jedd Wider, about a homeless woman whose body was found on a farm in New Hampshire. The reconstruction of Linda Bishop’s life is based on her detailed diaries, but the film also includes those whom she left behind, her sister, girlfriend, daughter and the owner of the abandoned house where she was hiding during the last months of her life.
Using a variety of sources, the directors gradually tell the story about her, with the help of read excerpts from her diaries and with shots of things which Linda had seen and lived through – for example, the abandoned house where she spent a harsh winter, surviving on rainwater and apples. Police officers who found the body first thought that it was a suicide, but actually it was a complicated story about a bipolar woman and the healthcare system that could not help her.
The second hybrid film will be “The Land of the Enlightened” by Belgian director Pieter-Jan De Pue, an unusual and unforgettable film about Afghanistan, based on 16 mm footage filmed over seven years. While US troops are preparing to leave, De Pue goes into hidden fringes of the country where boys are joining gangs to control trade routes, sell explosives from mines left over after the war, play on rusty tanks, and define new rules of war which are imposed by the harsh terrain around them.
Younger viewers might be interested in the film “All These Sleepless Nights” by Polish director Michal Marczak, an author of the controversial, but highly successful film “Fuck for Forrest”. In his new film, the director examines boundaries of documentary filmmaking in the story about two students growing up, which was recorded during a year and a half of intense socializing with them.
The story about the sincere, yet stereotypical guys is presented through sudden stylistic changes: it takes a narrative form which suddenly turns into cinema verite. The protagonists smoke, take drugs, make passes at girls and break records in meaningless conversations. The film received an award for direction at Sundance.
The international documentary film festival ZagrebDox will take place from 26 February to 5 March at the newly-refurbished Kaptol Boutique Cinema, and will bring together more than 120 documentary films from all over the world.
