A Girl and a Tree heading to Marseilles

25. June 2013
The film A Girl and a Tree, the last piece of Vlado Škafar's film poetry, will have its international premiere at the 24th International Film Festival in Marseilles, which is starting on 2 July and ending on 8 July.

The French festival is known far and wide as one of the most important documentary film festivals in Europe and worldwide, second in rank after the Amsterdam documentary film festival.
A Girl and a Tree will take part in the competition programme of sixteen films, among them four debuts. It will be screened on 4 and 6 July and followed each time by the discussion with the director.  The international premiere of the film A Girl and a Tree will take place at the same time as the world premieres of two other Slovenian films in another part of Europe: in Karlovy Vary the films Dual by the director Nejc Gazvoda and Adria Blues by Miroslav Mandić will be shown.
If Dual and Adria Blues have yet to appear at the Festival of Slovenian Film and be distributed in Slovenia, the film A Girl and a Tree has already left all of that behind. Its Slovenian premiere took place in SNG Drama, which was also the home theatre of the protagonists of the film: actresses Štefka Drolc and Ivanka Mežan. After its appearance at the Portorož festival, the film was screened in a very unorthodox manner rather than following the ordinary distribution channels. How could it – on 24 October 2012 Špela Barlič wrote the following about it in the Pogledi magazine: "It is a slow, meditative, pastel-coloured film without sharp cuts and edges, addressing emotionally open viewers, feeling inclined to meander slowly between the joys and pains of the human existence."
At the first glance the discussions between the actresses, shot in Bela krajina in all four seasons, are a film about the passage of time, which, as the director Vlado Škafar put it, become a film "about that which does not pass".
In Slovenia the film was screened in cinemas and theatres suitable for it as well as its main actresses: from SNG Drama to Kinodvor in Ljubljana, Park theatre in Murska Sobota, etc.
However, the special nature of the film obviously came across at the festival in Marseilles, where they do not know the Slovenian actresses but still understood the film's power.  Céline Guénot wrote the following about the film: "The depth that Škafar creates with slow fade-outs is the very depth of existence itself, to which speech is trying to hold on. This, the film captures miraculously".
In 2009 Vlado Škafar also presented his film Night Time with Mojca at the Marseilles Festival.

More information at:
www.fidmarseille.org/index.php/fr/festival/competition-internationale