Third films by ZFF's favourites
27 September 2012 – A programme by the name of My Third Film is this year’s novelty at Zagreb
Film Festival and presents third films by the filmmakers whose first and/or second titles marked the
earlier editions of the festival. Some of them even won the main festival ward – the Golden Pram.
Therefore, the programme consists of five third feature-length pieces by filmmakers we have been
following right from the beginning.
The French-Belgian trio of directors consisting of Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy
have already won the Golden Pram for Iceberg and Rumba. Their new entertaining drama The Fairy
speaks of Dom, a night watch in a small hotel in the industrial port city of Le Havre. One night a
woman named Fiona, wearing unusual clothes, comes and claims she is a fairy. After granting him
the first two wishes, she mysteriously disappears. Dom, who in the meantime falls in love with Fiona,
embarks on a quest for his mysteriously vanished fairy. This third live action film by the talented trio
of comedians contains a series of slapstick situations that call to mind the works of Charlie Chaplin,
Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. Full of colourful side characters and gracious dance scenes, the film
The Fairy is a whimsical tale about luck which can be found in everyone’s life.
In addition to the French-Belgian trio, Andrei Zviagincev is another author in the programme, both of
whose earlier films, The Return and The Banishment, received the main award at ZFF. This Russian
actor and director explores in his new film one of his central preoccupations: survival of the adapted,
survival at any cost, humanity and characteristics of humanity. Elena is a psychological drama about a
modest woman. Despair and motherly care for her son led her to commit a crime, i.e. to murder her
rich husband. However, as Zviagincev also stresses, unlike Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment,
she does not suffer punishment, which is, in his view, a sort of a mirror of contemporary society.
Alongside numerous awards, the film Elena won the jury’s Special Mention at Cannes Film Festival.
For his earlier film Khadak, presented at the fifth Zagreb Film Festival, the directorial team Jessica
Woodworth and Peter Brosens won the Lion of the Future. Today, at the tenth edition of ZFF,
approximately a month after the opening in Venice, their latest work is here with us, a poetic film
The Fifth Season. This unforgettable tale of three children fighting for meaning while the world
around them is collapsing portrays humour, tragedy, beauty and horror, quite frequently in the same
scene. Given that this film is strongly dominated by scenes of beautiful rural countryside, the
authors, when speaking about cinematic influences, quoted Werner Herzog: “What have we done to
our environment? We put it to shame!”
Xavier Dolan is definitely a darling of ZFF’s audience. All three of his feature-length live action films
he made between the age of nineteen and twenty-three were screened at Cannes film festival. For
his debut film I Killed My Mother, he won Art Cinema, Prix Regards Jeunes, SACD Award in Cannes,
but also ZFF’s Golden Pram. His second film Heartbeats also thrilled the Zagreb audience and was
highly praised just like the first one. The fact that he did not wait long to proceed with his third film
points to a filmmaker of great potential. Laurence Anyways is an epic tale of an unsustainable love
affair in which one of the partners decides to change his sex. This time Xavier Dolan’s film is
screened outside the official selection, but within the programme My Third Film.
The last film in this programme is a piece by, as many say, the best Slovenian director Jan Cvitkovič,
Archeo. A man, a woman and a child – three people who do not know each other and all they have in
common is a wish to survive, each in their own way. Their encounters are first filled with fear,
animosity and mistrust, but different situations they experience will finally bring them together.
Films from the programme My Third Film will be screened at Tuškanac cinema and the Museum of
Contemporary Art.
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