Monday at ZFF: ‘Beware of Children’ and ‘Let there be Light’

The Norwegian director Dag Johan Haugerud is arriving to ZFF today and will present his film Beware of Children from the competition program for feature films through a Q&A after the screening at 7 PM at Tuškanac. When 13-year-old Lykke, daughter of a prominent Labour politician, fatally wounds her friend Jamie, a son of a well-known right-wing politician, complete chaos ensues in which adults lose every sense of their moral compass. This sociodrama, which premiered at Venice Days, goes to the heart of the idea of tolerance and its disintegration in the clash of irreconcilable world views. Dag Johan is a novelist, screenwriter, director and librarian. His directorial debut is the short film 16 levende klisjeer (1998). For his first feature film Som du ser meg (2012), he won the Norwegian Critics’ Award and four national Amanda awards.

At 2 PM, in Tuškanac Cinema, we will see the first film from the PLUS program which is curated and awarded by highschoolers, Let there be Light by director Marko Škop. After the success of his debut feature film Eva Nová (Toronto 2015 – FIPRESCI Award), the Slovakian director living in Zagreb brings us a family drama about moral responsibility and xenophobia in Eastern Europe. Let there be Light is the Slovakian Oscar contender and it premiered in Karlovy Vary (Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Best Actor Award). The film will be introduced by young curators of the PLUS program, and the screening will be followed by a Q&A with the director.

At 5 PM there is a screening of the new film by a Swedish absurdist Roy Andersson About Endlessness from the Together Again program, and at the end of the Tuškanac day, from 10.30 PM, we have Checkers, a competition program for short films. We will see Snitch by Rino Barbir – a story about the teenager Deni who is still a mama’s boy, but wants to be like his rapper idols, as well as Fragile by Tomislav Šoban about Alma (Maja Posavec), a young actress who goes through a series of acting rehearsals and projects while looking for an apartment, while her best friends emigrates to Belgium. Before the screening of this year’s competition films, we will also screen the short film The Cleaning Lady, in honor of Matija Vukšić, our departed colleague, laureate, and jury member of the 16th ZFF.

The last opportunity to see Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit will be at 7 PM at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and at 9 PM we will screen The Traitor, a story from the Great 5 program about the most famous mafia pentito, directed by the Italian veteran Marco Bellochio.

In the Fragments of the Exile program in KIC Hall we screen Katzelmacher at 7 PM. The second feature film from the German great Rainer Werner Fassbinder is a depiction of intolerance with which a group of financially and sexually frustrated friends will welcome an immigrant worker, Jorgos, to their neighbourhood in Munich, revealing that the bourgeois fascism is still latently present. At the same place, at 9 PM, we will screen the Swedish-Danish film Koko-di Koko-da, a gloomy horror fairy tale by Johannes Nyholm about a married couple dealing with an awful tragedy. The film is part of the program Festivals in the Spotlight where we will present the Mediterranean Film Festival Split and Kino Mediteran.

On Monday at 4 PM in KIC Hall, the INDUSTRY program, ZFF’s platform for film professionals, will host a masterclass by Hayley McKenzie, founder and CEO Script Angel company specialized for developing programs for screenwriters. McKenzie will explain the basic differences between storytelling in feature films and TV drama shows. The goal is to learn how to create an engine for your idea and how to structure a story through several episodes. Attendees will be able to explore genres which best suit television storytelling, and they will have the opportunity to discover ways of creating complex characters which develop over a number of seasons. The masterclass is open to the public.