Zagreb's annual film week is shaping up as one of the stronger autumn reasons to be in the Croatian capital. The 24th Zagreb Film Festival runs from 9 to 15 November 2026, and the early programme announcement already reads like a European festival highlights reel.
The flagship Great 5 programme — which showcases titles from Europe's major national cinemas — includes Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved, a psychological drama with Javier Bardem as a successful filmmaker who returns to Spain and casts his estranged adult daughter in his new film, with predictably combustible results on set. The UK entry, Wicker, stars Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård in an oddball fairy-tale based on an Ursula Wills-Jones short story: a lonely fisherwoman in a medieval coastal village commissions a husband woven from willow branches, who then comes to life. It premiered at Sundance and won warm notices for its humane, good-humoured tone.
The Revenge of the Film programme brings the heavier hitters. Andrey Zvyagintsev returns after nine years away — he has since left Russia into exile — with Minotaur, which took the Grand Prix at Cannes and reworks Chabrol's 1969 The Unfaithful Wife into a modern story of a businessman (Gleb) whose marriage to Galina buckles under suspicion of infidelity. A Zvyagintsev regular, Zagreb has previously hosted The Return, Elena and Loveless. Romanian director Radu Jude contributes his seventh festival selection, The Diary of a Chambermaid, a gentler-than-usual look at economic exploitation through a Romanian domestic worker in France. Belgium's Lukas Dhont follows Close with Cuckoo, a First World War story of two young soldiers running a theatre troupe on the Western Front whose leads shared an acting prize at Cannes.
Families get a look in too. The KinoKino children's programme has five titles, judged in part by a kids' jury: Iron Boy, a hand-painted film from former Pixar animator Louis Clichy (WALL-E, Up) that won a Special Jury Prize at Cannes; Paul Negoescu's Berlin-honoured Atlas of the Universe; Dutch lighthouse adventure Lampie; swimming-pool comedy Splish Splash Forever!; and Janne Schmidt's The King of the Wanderers, which handles homelessness and mental vulnerability for younger viewers. There's even a shorts slot for ages three and up.
For travellers, this is a neat excuse for a November city break: Zagreb in mid-November means film-hopping between screenings, then warming up on the city's coffee culture, Christmas markets typically starting to ramp up, and hearty continental food. Screenings and details are published on the festival's official website and social channels, and the KinoKino titles will later tour cinemas across Croatia — so a trip after the festival itself can still catch the kids' lineup.
