28^th FESTROIA HOMAGES THE CROATIAN CINEMATOGRAPHY And the Crystal Dolphin goes to... Croatia.

The 28th Festroia is proud to homage Croatian cinematography in 2012. Our special programme dedicated to Croatian filmmaking is a natural consequence of more than a decade of showing Croatian films to Portuguese audiences.
After the war, the first time Festroia showed a film from Croatia was in 1998. It was Branko Schmidt's Christmas in Vienna, a film about the harsh reality of war and the complexity of human relations.
Ever since, our admiration for Croatian cinema grew constantly and it became even bigger after the wonderful experience I had as a jury in the big arena of the Pula Film Festival, in 2008.
Throughout the years, many of Croatia's most prominent directors and actors have come to Festroia with their films and got a well deserved recognition. In 2007, for example, Croatian screenwriter Ognjen Svilicic won the Best Screenplay award for Armin, and Rajko Grlic went up the stage three times, collecting the Gold Dolphin for Best Film, the Best Director award and the FIPRESCI Prize for his fabulous tragicomic feature Border post.

More recently, in 2010, Festroia screened the collection of short films Zagreb Stories, produced by Boris Matic. On the occasion, one of those shorts, Zvonimir Juric's Yellow moon, won the Mário Ventura Award, awarded to the best screenplay of a European short film being showcased at the festival, a prize that has a very special place in my heart, since it bears the name of my late husband, who was a renowned writer and the founder of Festroia.
Our goal when we started Festroia was to promote films from countries that did not have the overwhelming marketing power of Hollywood productions, although they had an overwhelming ability to tell good stories and touch people's hearts. And we all know that that's what the Croatian films do.