This year’s Zagreb Film Festival competition again includes several Croatian films and co-productions, and this year at the festival they will be presented by their authors and film crew members!
A new film by Bosnian and Herzegovinian director Ines Tanović, also her feature fiction debut – Our Everyday Life – is running for the Golden Pram in the feature film category. The author took a story about a family from Sarajevo trying to tackle the post-war daily life in Bosnia almost to a symbolic level of many idiosyncratic individual destinies of the transitional Balkan society. The film stars Uliks Fehmiu, the son of famous actor Bekim Fehmiu (best known to the broader audience for his role of Beli Bora in Aleksandar Saša Petrović’s I Even Met Happy Gypsies), with Emir Hadžihafizbegović as his father. The cast also includes Croatian actors Nina Violić, Goran Bogdan and Goran Navojec. Even though this is a film debut, Ines Tanović is not a stranger on the local scene: her documentary film Exhibition screened in Cannes and A Day on the Drina won ZagrebDox’s Big Stamp.
The film Sparrows by Rúnar Rúnarsson, an Icelandic-Danish-Croatian co-production about a sixteen-year-old boy, a child of divorced parents, who reluctantly visits his father in remote Westfjords (the cast also includes Rade Šerbedžija), after its world premiere at one of the most important film festivals – the one in Toronto – has been writing an amazing success story! Recently at Warsaw Film Festival it won the main award, as well as the Golden Shell for best film in San Sebastian. The Zagreb premiere at the upcoming ZFF will be attended by the film’s director Rúnar Rúnarsson, actor Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson (playing the estranged father), Icelandic and Danish producers, as well as the Croatian co-producer Igor A. Nola. Rúnarsson returns to ZFF after three years; in 2012 his debut film Volcano competed for the Golden Pram, and in 2008 ZFF’s short section screened his film Two Birds. ZFF’s audience is also familiar with actor Sigurðsson, who last year presented the film Of Horses and Men – this impressively twisted Icelandic comedy finally won ZFF’s jury special mention.
Out of competition, the audience will also have a chance to see the omnibus Zagreb Stories Vol. 3, after it premiered at Pula Film Festival. Following the previous two omnibuses, the third Zagreb Stories include six short films directed by Ivan Salaj, Vlatka Vorkapić, Petar Orešković, Matija Vukšić, Danilo Šerbedžija and Radislav Jovanov Gonzo, connected thematically by the motif of holidays.
The national Checkers competition again presents the latest film by many Croatian filmmakers, including Belladonna, editor Dubravka Turić’s debut, which won the best short film award in Mostra’s Horizons section in Venice, and Picnic by Jure Pavlović, whose first professional short film Half an Hour for Grandma screened in Checkers in 2010. Picnic is a story of fifteen-year-old Emir and his father who serves a prison sentence in Sarajevo. This fine portrayal of patriarchal Balkan clichés premiered in this year’s Berlinale Generation 14plus competition. Belladonna follows three women of different age and origin who accidentally meet in an ophthalmologist’s waiting room and quite unexpectedly experience a small moment of intimacy. The film was named after the eye drops used in ophthalmological examinations, dating back to the renaissance period, when they were often used by court women to make their eyes look bigger and more beautiful, but to the damage of their sight, belladonna is also the name of a poisonous plant which was used to make the drops, and in Dubravka Turić’s film it is a symbol of fragility of our accustomed views and prejudices.