The hub of urban cinephiles and lovers of culture and art, Zagreb Film Festival, is scheduled to take place for the 16th time between 11 and 18 November at the well-known locations: Europa cinema, Tuškanac cinema, Museum of Contemporary Art, F22 – New Academy Scene and Müller Hall, in addition to as many as 15 other venues across Croatia.

What is new about the upcoming festival edition is its spatial expansion as part of the event ZFF Travels. This year ZFF is thus visiting 16 Croatian cities, including: Zagreb, Velika Gorica, Samobor, Pula, Rijeka, Split, Hvar, Dubrovnik, Varaždin, Ivanec, Koprivnica, Bjelovar, Daruvar, Slatina and Đakovo.

As always, the main competition provides an overview of the most interesting recent debut or second features by directors from all over the world. Croatian short film is represented in the competition section Checkers, and this year’s visitors can again look forward to a series of side events, as well as INDUSTRY, a program intended for film professionals.

Three feature titles from this year Golden Pram run, screened in cinemas across Croatia, are already out: Women at War, the latest film and a comeback of Benedikt Erlingsson, the director of the Icelandic rural romance Of Horses and Men, which won a special mention at the 12th ZFF. The heroine of this weird action comedy is a female version of Don Quixote, a rural environmental activist charging on the local aluminium industry armed by an arch and arrows. The film is an Icelandic contender for an Academy Award, and was nominated for the LUX Prize, given by the European Parliament.

The Brazilian-Uruguayan Loveling by Gustavo Pizzi, which premiered at Sundance, is a heart-warming human drama about the chaotic life of a Brazilian middle-class family, and the British rom-com Old Boys, directed by Toby MacDonald, is a modern version of the Cyrano de Bergerac story, starring Alex Lawther (Imitation Game, Black Mirror, End of the F***ing World).

My First Film side program, screening debut features of acknowledged filmmakers, selected by Nenad Polimac, is this year presenting films by Czech filmmakers, while the new section Cinema at the Cinema at the moment when many cinemas are disappearing, presents a kind of tribute to the charm of the cinema, but also draws attention to the problems of cinemas globally and in our environment.

The Cinema at the Cinema section will screen, among other titles, Wim Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976), his homage to abandoned German cinemas, a touching and occasionally humorous tale of the friendship between two loners, a travelling cinema projector repairman and a depressive young man.