Slovenian Film Celebration at the Festival in Trieste
Slovenian films will not only be screened on that day, since this year the Slovenian presence at this Festival will be extensive and diverse. However, on Wednesday, 21 January, the programme "concentration" of films will be the strongest, as it will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Slovenian Film Centre. This year's anniversary celebration will begin precisely in Trieste: primarily because it corresponds to the date, but even more so because of the twenty‑year cooperation between the Trieste Film Festival and Slovenian Film Centre.
The Slovenian day will be celebrated by a feature film in the competition programme – Sonja Prosenc's debut The Tree, which started its tour of the festivals in July at Karlovy Vary, then went on to the Netherlands, Germany and India, and which will now be presented for the first time to our neighbours at 18:00 in the Tripcovich hall.
After the screening an event is to take place which is not only related to films, but is closely connected with the Slovenian film nevertheless: in the Miela theatre Hanna Preuss, winner of the Badjura Award for Life's Work, will stage a performance entitled Pavane for Antigone, which will also be the Italian premiere of this performance.
The Slovenian premiere of the work produced by Hanna Preuss's Sonorous Theatre took place on 28 July 2014, thus celebrating the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War.Pavane for Antigone is envisioned as a combination of intimate original narratives, focusing on the yearning of the modern people to find peace within themselves and the world around them, and to appease the discord in the society which keeps resulting in conflicts, making humanity weary. The sound of the sonorous compositions is intertwined with saxophone parts, words of live speech, video, as well as sculptures and set design elements, illuminated by special light.
After Hanna Preuss's 40‑minute performance the documentary film What About Mojca by the director Urša Menart will be screened in the Tripcovich hall at 22:30, focusing on the role of women in the Slovenian film and seeking the reflections of the changing position of women in the society in the film classics. At the last Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož this film received the Art Cinema Network Award. Thus the Slovenian day, which is to be announced by the documentary film Living Stone by the director Jurij Gruden on Tuesday, 20 January, at 15:30 in the Miela theatre, will conclude on Wednesday. Living Stone presents the deep ties between the people living in Karst and the Karst stone.
The final day of the festival will once again be dedicated to the memory of the First World War, as the Austrian‑Slovenian film The Woods Are Still Green by the director Marko Naberšnik will be shown in the programme of genre surprises. The film was shot in Slovenia at the location of the Soča Front and premiered at the Ljubljana Film Festival in November 2014.
Apart from the Slovenian original films, the Slovenian cinematography also took part in two other films shown in the competition programme of features: the Serbian film Barbarians by the director Ivan Ikić (co‑produced by Restart) and the Croatian film The Reaper by the director Zvonimir Jurić (co‑produced by Forum Ljubljana). Nine films had been selected for the competition programme, and Slovenia participated in as many as three of them!
For the fifth year in a row a meeting of co‑producers will also take place in the context of the Trieste Festival, entitled When East Meets West (18-20 January) due to the city's and region's geographic location. Every year the Italian producers and producers from South‑East Europe meet filmmakers from a third region: first it was Spain, then France, then the Scandinavian countries, the German‑speaking countries, and Benelux. This year the meeting will also be extended to North America, since this time it's the English‑speaking countries' turn: Great Britain, Ireland, United States and Canada. 22 projects were selected out of 285 projects that applied, among them also the Slovenian feature film endeavour Good Day for Work by the director Martin Turk and Bela Film production house. The script development had already been supported by the Slovenian Film Centre. Before this film Martin Turk had made his debut feature entitled Feed Me With Your Words (2012).
The twentieth anniversary of the Slovenian Film Centre in Trieste will begin solemnly and actively, which is what the anniversary year 2015 is supposed to be like at all of the film locations in Slovenia and abroad.
