Kastelic's The Box main ambassador of Slovenian film in 2018
Ljubljana, 17 December - Slovenia's ever-underfunded film production remained modest volume-wise in the past year, but some filmmakers, in particular animator Dušan Kastelic, documentarist Matjaž Ivanišin and Czech-based director Olmo Omerzu, left a noteworthy mark on the international scene.
Ljubljana
The Kinodvor art cinema.
Photo: Anže Malovrh/STA
File photo
Following in the footsteps of Špela Čadež, who swept the animated film festivals circuit in 2017, Kastelic's short animated film The Box, inspired by his nightmares, won the top award at all the 14 festivals it has competed in so far, including at the Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, US, which won it a direct nomination for the 2019 Oscar award.
Ivanišin's Playing Men, the story of a director in a creative crisis, has also been screened at over 50 festivals, winning a dozen of awards and nominations and going into regular distribution in France. Ivanišin already had substantial success with his 2013 documentary Karpopotnik, an homage to Slovenian director and cinematographer Karpo Godina, who was honoured with a retrospective at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in October.
Omerzu won the Best Director Award in Karlovy Vary with the coproduction Winter Flies, which was moreover selected for the Toronto Film Festival along with Consequences, the debut film by Darko Štante, who won the best director award at the Festival of Slovenian film.
The annual central meet of Slovenian film, held in September, saw 16 feature-length films in the running for the main awards, a telling detail being that half were documentaries. The best film award went to My Last Year as a Loser, the debut feature by Urša Menart, who made a dramedy about the disillusionment of her over-educated, under-employed generation.