Visit Zagreb Film Festival on Croatia holidays

Film lovers may be interested in taking in the Zagreb Film Festival on their Croatia holidays this autumn.

The ninth edition of the highly anticipated cinematic event comes to Zagreb on Sunday October 16th and will run until Sunday October 23rd.

Film lovers of every persuasion will have the chance to take in around 90 different films, which will be screened at venues including Europe, Tuskanac, Dokukino Croatia and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Novi Zagreb.

As part of the festival's main programme, 12 feature films will be screened alongside ten short films and 15 documentaries, with 34 cinematic offerings competing for the chance to claim the festival's Golden Pram award.

The Red Westerns programme will present a range of films in the niche Communist Western genre, which rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s in Eastern Europe.

The genre was primarily born out of a burgeoning artistic and ideological response to American Western films, which were perceived as being too decadent.

In the Big Five programme, festival goers will have the opportunity to view the latest hit films from five European countries: Italy, Germany, France, Spain and the UK.

This year, festival organisers plan to show an Austrian film as part of the EUNIC network presentation, while Danish films will be the primary focus for the My First Film programme.

Boris T Matic, director of the Zagreb Film Festival, said: "Among other films in our documentary program, we can single out here 'Maria's' Own by Zeljka Sukova.

"After having been shown in Toronto and Karlovy Vary, this unusual musical comedy about three women and their late grandmother, accompanied by the music of the popular Czech dance electro-trash band Midi Lidi, will be shown to Croatian audience for the first time."

Although the budget for this year's festival has been cut by 20 per cent, organisers are convinced that it will be as popular as ever.