Guardian of the Frontier at the New Directors/New Films festival

07. April 2003
At the important film festival
"New Directors / New Films" in New York that took place until 6 April 2003, two Slovenian films were shown: the short film (A)torsion and the full-length film Guardian of the Frontier. Maja Weiss, the director of Guardian of the Frontier, and her producer Ida Weiss are guests at the festival. The New York Times wrote about the film: In the Flow of Reality and Fantasy
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
New York Times, 3 April 2003, an excerpt from the review "Maja Weiss's intensely provocative film, "Guardian of the Frontier," is not the first movie to portray a leisurely boat trip down a river as a metaphorical journey from so-called civilization into an atavistic dream. "Apocalypse Now" and "Deliverance" immediately come to mind as forerunners. But this fable of three young women who embark on a summer canoe trip down the Kolpa River, which divides Slovenia and Croatia, uncovers layer upon layer of social, political and even mythical resonance in an adventure that takes on the quality of a fairy tale. Other enriching echoes that ripple through the movie include "Beauty and the Beast" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Feminism, globalization and the deep-seated tribal passions that ignited the Balkan wars are only three of the pertinent themes touched on by the film, which offers a remarkably evenhanded, and disturbing, reflection on the tug of war between modernism and older cultural forces percolating below the glossy facade of contemporary life. For all its political reverberations, "Guardian of the Frontier" does not put forth a clear-cut agenda, and that is one of its many strengths. No matter where we may live, it suggests, these profoundly antagonistic forces are engaged in a pitched battle in what, with regional variations, amounts to a global conflict."