Icelandic filmmakers Ninna Pálmadóttir and Rúnar Rúnarsson, esteemed Italian editor Marco Costa, new acting hotshots Tessa Van den Broeck and Grace Biot, Locarno laureates and sisters on film, Gelminė Glemžaitė and Agnė Kaktaitė & Croatian actress and Diva Futura star, Tesa Litvan

After triumphing at the Pula Film Festival and taking home an armful of Golden Arenas (including the one for Best Film), the acclaimed Croatian drama Celebration arrives to the big screens in Zagreb. The film will inaugurate the 22nd Zagreb Film Festival on 4 November, presented to the ZFF audience by its director Bruno Anković, producers Tina Tišljar and Rea Rajčić, and numerous members of the film crew and cast headed by actors Krešimir Mikić, Klara Fiolić, Lars Štern, Jan Doležal and Tanja Smoje.

That’s It for Today, also screening in the main Feature Film competition, hailed as “the fairy tale about happy people”, enchanted the viewers with its simple and heart-warming story, and was a box office hit at Serbian cinemas for weeks. The film’s director Marko Đorđević, actors Filip Đurić, Ivana Vuković, Miona Pejković, Goran Bogdan, producer Miloš Pušić, production designer Miljena Vučković, and director of photography Stefan Milosavljević will be in attendance at the Croatian premiere. Happy Holidays, a vivid portrait of the coexistence of Arabs and Jews in Haifa, will be presented in Zagreb by producer Jiries Copti, while the Romanian drama The New Year That Never Came will be introduced by editor and co-producer Vanja Kovačević.

The intense Lithuanian drama Drowning Dry of director Laurynas Bareiša, awarded for Best Direction at Locarno, will be presented in Zagreb by lead actresses and sisters on film – Gelminė Glemžaitė and Agnė Kaktaitė, also this year’s winners of the award for Best Performance in Locarno. The character study Julie Keeps Quiet of Belgian director Leonardo Van Dijl impressed tennis player Naomi Osaka so much that she decided to get invloved with the film (as executive producer), in order to encourage further discussion and instigate changes on the tennis courts and beyond. This is also the work of the lead actresses in the film, Tessa Van den Broeck and Grace Biot, both former tennis players, who will be attending this year’s ZFF.

The 13th edition of Industry, the program dedicated to film professionals, will host a number of distinguished filmmakers, who will share with the ZFF audience their experiences and advice from a creative and practical point of view. Alongside award-winning Icelandic director and screenwriter Rúnar Rúnarsson, another visiting filmmaker will be editor Marco Costa (Bones and All, Challengers, Queer), a longtime collaborator of director Luca Guadagnino, who will share the creative process of working on the feature Challengers, in conversation with editor Iva Ivan.

Numerous guests in Zagreb will be presenting films screening in the program Together Again. Rúnarsson will arrive to present his new film When the Light Breaks, as well as hold a masterclass as a part of the Industry program, in cooperation with the Filmmakers Association of Croatia. The ZFF audience is well-acquainted with Rúnarsson’s work, having already seen Vulcano (ZFF 2011), Sparrows (ZFF 2015) and Echo (ZFF 2021), while two of his films (Sparrows and When the Light Breaks) are minority Croatian co-productions.

Well-known faces will also attend the Zagreb premiere of This Is Not a Love Song, the latest film of director Nevio Marasović, starring Lana Barić and Janko Popović Volarić, as well as the Croatian premiere of Dwelling Among the Gods directed by Vuk Ršumović and co-produced by Ankica Jurić Tilić and Vanja Sremac, while Slovenian director Janez Burger will present his psychological thriller Observing.

On the tail of its world premiere in the official competition at the Venice Film Festival, Italian feature Diva Futura will have its Croatian premiere in the program The Great 5, attended by Zagreb theatre and film actress Tesa Litvan (Even Pigs Go to Heaven, The Diary of Diana B.), who appears in one of the lead roles in the film. Tesa was chosen among more than 120 actresses for the role of Eva Henger, the wife of Italian porn publisher Riccardo Schicchi.

Dutch director Peter Hoogendoorn will present his heart-warming feature Three Days of Fish from the Network of Festivals in the Adriatic Region program, while arriving in Zagreb from Iceland will be director Ninna Pálmadóttir, a member of this year’s ZFF feature film jury and director of last year’s audience favourite, Solitude.

More information about the programs and titles of the 22nd ZFF is available here.