Zagreb Film Festival is very pleased to welcome director, screenwriter and cinematographer Michael Glawogger as a member of this year's Documentary Film Jury. But that is not all – Michael Glawogger's retrospective will be shown as part of our side programs and he will hold masterclass. The retrospective films have been selected by Martin Schweighofer, Director of Austrian Film Board and ZFF Artistic Advisor.

In order to present a full cross-section of Glawogger's work, Schweighofer has selected seven films, including feature films Contact High, Haiku and Slumming, documentary films Megacities, Workingman's Death and France, Here We Come! and experimental film Street Noise.

Michael Glawogger is a director, writer and cinematographer and his work in each of these roles displays a broad spectrum. Glawogger was born in Graz, Austria, in 1959. He is a traveling filmmaker. Not only does he literally journey around the world for his documentaries, he also moves back and forth between forms and genres, between photography and writing, between gentler and more forceful tones. He graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute and the Vienna Film Academy and has since worked as a director, writer, and cinematographer in Vienna, Bangkok, and Znojmo. His recent works range from the literary adaptation Kill Daddy Good Night (2009) and the quirky comedies Slugs (2004) and Contact High (2009) to his essayist documentaries Whore's Glory (2011), Megacities (2009) and Workingman's Death (2004).

‘If one looks at the big picture, Michael, Glawogger's films add up to some uncanny kind of modern Odyssee. Regardless of whether they are fiction or documentaries they all tell of travels to unchartered territories, geographically and/or psychologically speaking. Glawogger' cinemativ adventures confront us with idiosyncratic situations and feature strange and wonderful creatures, people fighting demons that are crowding their everyday lives - in a shipwreck dump in Pakistan or a burlesque theater in Mexico, in the mean streets of New York or a slaughterhouse in Nigeria, a brothel in Bangladesh or a coalmine in the Ukraine. Michael Glawogger loves underdogs - almost as much as he likes stray dogs.’, says Martin Schweighofer.

Restart and Zagreb Film Festival are organizing on 16th of October, in cinema Dokukino KIC (Preradoviæeva 5) at 5 o’clock, Michael Glawogger awarded Austrian filmmaker and this year’s member of Zagreb Film Festival jury will maintain a masterclass in the form of the staged conversation with Serbian documentary filmmaker Boris Mitiæ in which they will talk about - nothing. Michael Glawogger's masterclass is organized by RESTART and Zagreb Film Festival, with the support of Austrian cultural forum, Croatian Audiovisual Center and Cultural department City of Zagreb.