FeKK 10!: It's not a Phase!
It was 2014. A small group of film aficionados, cinephiles, film critics, and aspiring filmmakers were volunteering at various film festivals, incessantly socialising at the Slovenian Cinematheque, and absorbing the lessons of film masterpieces on screen. Suddenly, there was an invitation to assist in promoting the Slovene short film in Clermont-Ferrand, and the rest is history. The festival had such an impact on us that we formed the Kraken Society for the Promotion of Short Film barely two months later and staged the final edition of the K3 Ljubljana International Film Festival in August 2014. The most credit for it belongs to Igor Prassel, this year’s jury member, who took us on multiple trips to Clermont-Ferrand and introduced us to the entire galaxy of short film festivals. Igor is not only indirectly responsible for the festival’s creation but also for many of us forever straying onto the exciting path of shorts (Igor, thank you!).
The following year, we felt compelled to arrange our own festival that would reflect ourselves, our surroundings, and the generation we belonged to. As digital filmmaking and online distribution became more widely available, independent film production was thriving also in Slovenia. The democratisation of filming resulted in an exciting generation of filmmakers who almost completely avoided institutional frameworks. Furthermore, despite some brief initiatives, there was still a lack of a platform that would professionally and consistently represent short film production at home and abroad. So, FeKK was born—without a slogan or funding, but with plenty of passion and gracious support from the Slovenian Cinematheque, which continues to this day.
Since its inception, the festival has been based on community and connection, and the local young viewers and film scene have welcomed it with open arms, representing the festival’s imperative—to strive for professionalisation and gradual development of short film production while also having fun. Our then catalogue editor and renowned film critic pondered in her first editorial: “It’s an ingenuity that has—if I may say so—said fuck you to all the established, institutional and institutionalised cultural, artistic, and financed festival and other practices that have never really appreciated the underdogs—partially represented by FeKK. FeKK’s eternal conflict between seriousness and unseriousness, or better, its dilemma regarding seriousness despite unseriousness, is, in my opinion, its drive, something that motivates, explains, and excuses its success and its (minor) failures.” It is worth noting that in the early editions, we were able to print the catalogue as late as six months after the festival. Perhaps the most intriguing text from the first catalogue is the interview with the crew, namely the topic of what we anticipate from the festival. Among our answers there was the desire that the festival “would establish a long-term space for short film screenings” and an estimation that the first edition would be successful “if it is the first and not the last, as well as if the festival becomes a relevant creative junction dedicated to short films, an overview of quality production at home, in a larger region, and across the world.”
Today, ten editions later, we are pleased to report that we have accomplished all of that, and even more than we could have hoped for in the first. With the third edition, we realised that FeKK is becoming the primary short film platform in Slovenia and that it serves as the axis around which various new short film events and initiatives revolve. With the fourth edition, we broke the Gordian knot by operating without any proper institutional funding. For the fifth edition, we were able to highlight the concept of a five-year plan and planned economy, as well as attempt to envision larger and broader steps for the next five years. And, if the pandemics stunned us in the sixth year, we began to actualise the five-year-plan objectives in the seventh edition by widening our focus and included the (almost) entire Balkan Peninsula into the former Yugoslavia competition programme.
And now we are here. In its first decade, FeKK has become an internationally established short film festival. It continues to be sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and the City of Ljubljana. It is a member of two European festival networks, as well as the Short Film Conference, the greatest international festival association for short films. It is also co-funded by Creative Europe and gets grants as a member of The END network and as a festival. In ten years, FeKK has screened 1,000 short films from more than 60 countries, hosted over 350 international guests, and welcomed over 80,000 people to the festival and other annual events. All of this would not have been possible without the dedicated crew and volunteers, as well as the extensive network of partners and unwavering collaboration. So, as the festival enters its tenth year, we can elatedly look ahead to a new decade and hail FeKK and the short form on their new decadal journey, exclaiming, “It’s not a phase!”
The catalogue of the 10th edition of the festival is available here: FeKK 2024 – Katalog
Peter Cerovšek, Matevž Jerman