Industry programme

Lessons for Professionals: Darkness Devours the Ignorant

This year’s festival addresses our world’s dark times with one key emphasis: darkness teaches us valuable lessons, and it is our responsibility to hear them. In addition to journeying across film programmes, we also embark on lessons of darkness by allowing space for contemplation and discussion among film industry professionals. 

PROFeKK begins with a round table on documentary film as a medium for critical and often-silenced voices, providing direct insight into the social engagement of film industry professionals. Continuing PROFeKK’s social habit, the round table will be followed by networking with a diverse collection of audience members and festival guests, including filmmakers, festival representatives, and other international film industry professionals.

This year’s PROFeKK devotes part of its programme to film curating and programming, which is why a curation workshop will join the existing film criticism workshop within the international festival network The END. The second day of the festival will therefore focus on the discussion about curation as an artistic, political and ethical practice. During the round table with guest curators (who’ve prepared their own curated programmes), we aim to encourage reflection on contemporary curatorial practice, strengthen dialogue between the Slovenian and international film landscapes, and mostly empower the new generation of curators to shape bold, independent and socially relevant programmes. The other reason to discuss curation is broader and more urgent. Today’s film festivals operate during interconnected social, political and environmental crises. All of these are closely knit together and often originate from the same political and economic structures, so the question of curation under such conditions is more important than ever.

With its two new competition programmes, Under the Sweet Sky and Little Secrets, the festival also expands film curating for the youngest audience. As a result, the round table on curating for young audiences will concentrate on important factors of understanding children and young audiences as well as strategies that allow these extremely particular target groups to be successfully engaged.

The public is welcome to attend all of the events, which will take place as moderated panels with professionals in the film industry, followed by audience conversations.

Throughout the festival, longer pre-registration workshops will be offered. Along with the END’s film criticism and film curation workshops, as well as the #vrednoogleda film criticism workshop, two additional in-depth practical workshops will be held over multiple days: Short Scene and Documentary Film Workshop.

And last but not least, we warmly invite you to attend the guided tour of Kela: Lessons of Darkness with the curator and artists who set up the exhibition, and the guided tour of A Cosmic Collective: OM Production and Its Second Coming, during which you’ll learn about the enigmatic cult entity of the experimental scene from half a century ago.