Slovenian competition programme

Professionalisation and Lyricism

Professionalisation and Lyricism

Just like last year, the FeKK SLO programme features many films created by Slovenian students attending international film academies such as the London Film School, the National Film School in Dublin, the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, and the FAMU in Prague. However, this year’s programme is also well-represented by students from Slovenian academies such as the Ljubljana Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, and the Nova Gorica School of Arts. We’ve also grown accustomed to Slovenian films appearing at the most renowned European festivals. No surprise, then, that this year’s FeKK SLO representatives have been screened at Cannes, Berlinale, Dresden, Stuttgart, Dokufest Prizren and Montpellier.

Along with increased professionalisation (films are produced by production companies and film academies), we see a decline in the number of independent (and experimental) films that draw their material from the internet or personal archival media, compared to previous years. Nonetheless, it appears that every year in the FeKK SLO programme, an experimental film offers an entirely new perspective on working with the infinite archive that is the Internet.

Many films in this year’s selection – including a fair portion of the fiction films – are marked by cinematic lyricism. This loose concept could be understood as cinematic poeticism that suspends the rhythm of a progressing narrativity and creates swirls of emotions. It achieves this effect either through rapid shifts of styles; through a lingering image overflown by soundscape; through the superimposition of dialogue scenes with impressions of nature or cityscapes; through a fairy-tale twist when addressing naturalist and class issues; through the dissolving of the human into flora or fauna; through colourful, playful and cross-species eroticism in space; through fragments of village anecdotes; through focusing on the expressiveness and weight of a face that leaves tragedy unspoken; through a lyrical, personal declaration, which the image doesn’t anchor in human actors but expands to an all-encompassing emotion using vivid scenes; or, ultimately, through internet sources that aren’t ground for outdated ideological criticism but are appropriated in a way that they reenable the sensitivity, otherwise systematically anaesthetised on platforms with information overload and conflicting data. In short, lyricism is understood as a strategy meant to bring emotions back to the forefront.

The competition programme is accompanied by two Slovenian Panorama sections. Given the abundance of experimentation (also in the fiction films), we named the first one Experiments and Wanderings, featuring filmmakers from different generations. The second one focuses on fights in the broadest sense, from the wry fight with death and the fight against violence and bullies to the fight for love, so we had no choice but to name the programme We’ll Keep On Fighting.

This year FeKK received 168 film submissions. 17 have been selected for the FeKK SLO competitive programme and 17 for the thematic programme.

Oskar Ban Brejc, Matevž Jerman, Robert Kuret, Dora Trček