Three films co-produced by Restart were included in the Regional competition of this year’s ZagrebDox. Among them are the documentary hybrid “Between Revolutions” by Vlad Petri, “The Investigator” by Viktor Portel and “Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels” by Mila Turajlić. All films will have it’s Croatian premieres.
“Between Revolutions“, produced by Romanian Activ Docs, Restart and undisclosed Iranian producer, which won the FIPRESCI award for the best film in the Forum program of this year’s Berlinale, where it had its world premiere, tells the story of Zahra and Maria, who met at the University of Bucharest in the 1970s. When the hope of political change draws Zahra home to Iran they are forced apart. For the next decade their only way to communicate is through letters. Screenings of the film will be held on Tuesday, March 28th at 7 p.m. accompanied with the Q&A with the director, and on Wednesday, March 29th at 3 p.m.
Viktor Portel’s “The Investigator” (produced by Czech Frame Films in co-production with Restart, Czech TV, Croatian Radiotelevision and Al Jazeera Balkans) tells the story of Vladimír Dzuro, the Czech investigator of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague who was the first to bring one of the perpetrators of war crimes before the court. He collected evidence against war criminals and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing, and his two biggest cases were the Ovčara massacre and the ethnic cleansing in northwestern Bosnia. Premiere screening with the Q&A with the director is on the program on Wednesday, March 29th at 5:30 p.m. with the reprisal on Thursday, March 30th at 3 p.m.
The new film by multi-awarded author Mila Turajlić, “Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudović Reels“, is a journey through the archive of Tito’s personal cameraman Stevan Labudović and the birth of this emancipatory political movement. The film follows the birth of the Non-Aligned Movement and shows us the world behind the scenes in the era of personalities, politics and promises that marked the Third World, examining how the film medium helped create a global project of political emancipation. “Non-Aligned” are on the schedule on Tuesday, March 28th at 9 p.m. and Friday, March 31st at 5 p.m. when a Q&A with the director will take place.
The second part of the diptych of our most famous regional documentarist, “Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels” follows the Algerian war for independence and the mobilization of the film medium in the fight against colonialism, and it is being shown as a Special Screenings section. The screening will take place onWednesday, March 29th at 9 p.m. followed by Q&A with the director.
On Friday, March 31st at 3:00 p.m. in Dokukino KIC, Restart and ZagrebDox are organising a masterclass by Mila Turajlić Trail of archives: From official to private memory with a focuses on Mila’s multi-layered work with archives and the various artistic and research strategies. Turajlić will talk about her long-standing fascination with archives, which she turns to because of her dissatisfaction with the deliberate erasure of the history and cultural heritage of Yugoslavia. For her, the reappropriation of archives becomes a gesture against forgetting and a fight for the right of her generation to write their own history, in a personal and subjective register. The issue of commercialization of access to and ownership of film archives will also be addressed. The masterclass will be moderated by the director Nebojša Slijepčević.
This year’s author’s program is dedicated to Igor Bezinović. Among selected creative meanders of his previous work, the festival will also show Restart’s short film “An Encounter” from 2009. You can see it on March 31st at 5 p.m.
In the Happy Dox program, the distribution department Restart Label presents “The Pawnshop” by Polish director Łukasz Kowalski which tells the story of probably the biggest pawn shop in Europe. Jola and Wiesiek are a couple of eccentric businessmen who, together with their three employees, run a pawnshop in Bytom. However, the glory days of the store have passed due to the closing of nearby mines and increasing unemployment in the town. Although the pawnshop brings increasing losses, it is an irreplaceable center of the local community’s life. The film screening will take place on Saturday, April 1st at 5:30 p.m.
