The eighth edition of ZagrebDox, a leading documentary film festival in southeastern Europe, will take place from 26 February to 4 March in Movieplex in Kaptol Centar in the Croatian capital.

The programme offers more than 150 documentary stories from all over the world, the organisers told a news conference in Zagreb last Thursday.

This year's competition program of ZagrebDox includes 50 documentaries competing for the main festival awards, Big Stamps. Of these, 30 films are in the international and 20 in regional competition.

Little Stamp is awarded to a film director of up to 35 years of age.

Movies That Matter Award goes to a film that best promotes human rights.

In addition to the competition programme, there are six other official film programmes: Musical Dox, Happy Dox, Controversial Dox, State of Affairs and – launched last year – Masters of Dox and Teen Dox.

The side programmes include several retrospectives: Baltic Documentaries retrospective (selected by Danish film expert Tue Steen Mueller), Danish Film School (Den Danske Filmskole) retrospective (selected by Arne Bro, head of the Documentary Studio at DDF) and a retrospective of exploitation (often pseudo) documentaries focusing on sensationalist themes. These films, called Mondo, marked the 1960s.

In this year's author's retrospective the festival will present the internationally acclaimed and awarded independent U.S. filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt, whose filmography includes more than 25 films. Croatian retrospectives include the films of Fade In and the Author's Night is dedicated to film director Tomislav Radic.

The festival director, Nenad Puhovski, pointed out "People I Could Have Been and Maybe Am" by Boris Gerrets, an animated human-rights documentary "Green Wave" by Ali Samadi Ahadi or the beautifully photographed, socially committed film "The Tiniest Place" by Tatiana Huezo.

The films of great masters like Werner Herzog and Nick Broomfield will have their Croatian premieres.

The seventh edition was visited by 22,000 viewers.