Subversives Get Together at Zagreb Festival

The eighth annual Subversive Festival started on Sunday in Zagreb under the banner "Spaces of Emancipation: Micropolitics and Revolts".

Combining film screenings, debates, round tables and interviews, the 14-day festival is running in cinemas and faculties in the capital.

This unashamedly left-wing event aims to gather intellectuals, movie directors, academics, economists, activists and radical politicians.

The curent Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, and his Finance Minister, Janis Varufakis, from the left-wing Greek Syriza party, took part in the 2013 event.

This year, besides a representative of Syriza, a representative of Spain's left-wing Podemos party and members of other left-wing and green parties across Europe will attend.

Guests include the Indian philosopher and eco-feminist Vandana Shiva, Australian professor of economy Steve Keen, Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo and the Northern Irish Marxist writer and broadcaster Richard Seymour.

Forums will discuss the financial crisis in south-east Europe, ways to unite the left in the Balkans, sustainable and eco-friendly growth, human rights, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, TTIP, and other topics deemed important by leftist thinkers.

The festival will also gather writers and poets as a part of its "Fair of Engaged Literature" and poetry reading nights.

The festival opened with "Taxi", a film by Jafar Panahi, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin and shows the Iranian capital, Tehran, from the perspective of a taxi driver.

The festival will also see a showing of the documentary "Immortal Sergeant", by Syrian director Ziad Kalthoum, who recorded the movie in his native Syria in the middle of the brutal civil war...

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