Rab Film Festival is a new event for the Adriatic island in 2019. For its debut, the festival has lined up and interesting and thought-provoking line-up of new films and documentaries, including the premiere of the new Ken Loach movie 'Sorry We Missed You', his first since the award-winning 'I, Daniel Blake' (this one is set to the UK backdrop of the food bank system and an employment market without rights for workers). There's a gastronomic element to the event and a more than impressive music programme which includes performances by Croatian acts Zdenka Kovacicek & Greenhouse Blues Band, Damir Urban&4, Nipplepeople, Elemental and Detour.
The film programme contains winning entries from the past year's Cannes, Sundance and Berlin film festivals, with all foreign-language films containing both Croatian and English subtitles in a wise effort to engage as many locals and visitors as possible. The festival opens on 23 August with the film 'Les Misérables', its subject matter being the French race riots of 2005. The film's director Ladj Ly and lead actor Djibril Zonga will be in attendance. Aside from the aforementioned, other films to be featured include; 'Sons of Denmark', a contemporary crime story by first-time Danish director Ulaa Salim, set within a polarised and highly politicised multi-ethnic Europe, 'By the Grace of God', which is based on a true story about paedophilia in the Catholic Church and its cover-up plus two regional highlights in 'Stitches (Šavovi)' and 'Diary of Diana B (Dnevnik Diane Budisavljević)'. More than six brilliant-looking documentary films have also made it to the line-up of this first instalment.
The RAFF documentary competition consists of six titles. The Belgian Green Gold is a shocking background story on biofuels filmed over a period of ten years in all corners of the world; the German film The Cleaners leads its viewers into the shadow underworld of the Internet – the place where questionable content is removed; and the Dutch Bellingcat offers a unique insight into the world of citizen investigative journalism and the search for truth in the era of fake news and alternative facts.
The Rab festival will also feature two winners from this year’s Sundance Festival. Investigating the mysterious death of a UN secretary general, the Danish director Mads Brügger takes the viewers of his Cold Case Hammarskjöld on a journey through the darkest chapters of African history, while Sea of Shadows reveals the story of brave individuals who are saving the last living vaquita porpoises from the clutches of drug cartels. The only Croatian film in the competition, That’s the Way It Is (Tak kak je) – a moving story about a father trying to exercise his right to see his daughter after the divorce – is posing a number of questions about the discrimination of fathers in Croatia. The film will be introduced by Arsen Oremović, its director.