Discoveries from Slovenia World Cinema

A TV adaptation of the story “Twins” by Prezihov Voranc.

The Balkans cradles Europe's last wild rivers and supports abundant wildlife and healthy, intact ecosystems. These rivers are "The Undamaged" – clean, pristine, and undammed. With over 2,700 small and large hydro power plants planned or under construction in the Balkans, corruption and greed are destroying the last free-flowing rivers of Europe. Follow the Balkan Rivers Tour, a rowdy crew of whitewater kayakers, filmers, photographers and friends who decided to stand up for the rivers, travelling from Slovenia to Albania for 36 days, kayaking 23 rivers in 6 countries to protest the dams and show the world the secret wild rivers of the Balkans. The film honours everyday people and local activists who are fighting to defend rivers and aims to spread the word of the plight of these rivers, showing a new style of nature conservation that is fun, energetic and effective.

Egon Vittori (Janko Mandic) is thirteen years old and does not have a record player. It is the beginning of the seventies and Yugoslavia seems to be the land of prosperity. Goods are being imported from the West, and these include American music, films and fashion. Everybody but Egon owns a record player. Finding his path among his family members, hippie owners of music records, schoolmates, teachers, communists and dissidents. Egon gets his record player in the end. And grows up somewhere along the way. Written by (Slovenian film fund)

A man stays alone with his children in a half demolished house in the middle of a desolate field. His wife has just been killed by a grenade in a military battle. He is expecting a new attack. Instead a wandering caravan called Circus Fantasticus stops by the house. They bring along the dying director of the circus. Is it possible for anything beautiful to happen in a landscape of war and death? Can life go on? Is it possible to realize that death does not exist?

A docudrama set during winter period in the Slovenian coastal town of Piran.

Banned for over a decade because of its "explicit" sexual situations, when this film was released in Yugoslavia in 1983 the "explicit" scenes had become tame. Other than the notoriety it obtained through censorship, the film has an undistinguished story about the forbidden love affair between the older wife of a sports director and a young athlete.

Set in a Slovenian coastal town in WW2, the film tells a story about villagers who help partisans to get rid of Italian, and later German authorities that ruled the town in the last years of occupation.

The stories narrated by the film bring together individuals all over the world, spanning over sixty years and thus symbolically covering the approximate period of a single human life. Each of the stories is based on true accounts and events, summed up from newspaper articles, statements, and media announcements. Through internal monologues the collage makes up a whole which transcends any individual story.

OHO is considered one of the most interesting, complex and important examples of post-war avant-garde art in Central and Eastern Europe. After achieving major success as one of the first from Eastern Europe to exhibit at New York's MoMA, the group disbanded in 1971. OHO was not just an art collective but a unique cultural phenomenon that explored the visible and the immaterial through art, philosophy, sociology, science and coexistence with the earth and nature. Already in the 1960s, the group was raising relevant questions about anthropocentrism, ecology and the economics of the art. This documentary about OHO by Damjan Kozole is rich in never-before-seen archival material and, for the first time, comprehensively presents this inspiring phenomenon of intertwining art and life. - Slovenian Film Database

A canoe trip down the river Kolpa becomes a journey of discovery for three female students.

A childish and naive Luka, teenager whose world are action TV series and computer games, does not differ reality from fantasies, thus becoming a victim of his slightly older so-called friends who often take advantage of him. In attempt to move Luka off the street and its adverse effects, his mother finds him a nanny, who is unfortunately far from being a piece of event.

After being away for four years, Rok Osterberg returns to his home town to investigate the murder of his younger brother Maks. As Maks was involved in illegal business, nobody seems to care about his death. The only person willing to help is a family friend, Inspector Kramer. Back home, Osterberg must face people from his past.

A small town orchestra goes on a tour to Austria - an occasion to escape their everyday lives, indulge in heavy partying and try to connect with their true emotions. However, not everything will go as planned...

A Slovenian mother takes her addicted and self-destructive daughter with her to a remote Italian village. Isolation as attempted salvation. Inspired by Proust, Skafar turns this theme into a gentle and beautiful film, a poem about two souls in which the unutterable slowly comes to the surface.

Two mice discover a big wheel of cheese. Paradise, no less! But how to get in? One mouse has made it, its little brother is outside on his own and must watch out for the hungry cat. Inside the cheese wheel, the mouse lives like a king, eating its way through the yellow treat. But every bite brings it closer to the collapse of its house …

Heirloom is a tender and playful short film about the bond between granddaughter and grandmother, and the transmission of memory, care, and legacy across generations. A golden tooth veneer, passed from Mica to Lucija, becomes a symbolic device to stage love, farewell, and connection.

On a barren island, a mother and son confront years of silence and misunderstandings in writer-director Hanna Slak’s formidable fourth feature film starring Maren Eggert, scored by Amélie Legrand, and shot by Claire Mathon.

Cmurek castle, formerly a mental institution, is now home to the Museum of Madness. The local community realizes that stories about the castle, the fates of the patients, the accounts of the staff, and the personal items left in the castle make an important if also difficult legacy.

A video based on the dance performance HI-RES by Maja Delak and Male Kline. The video poses questions and give some unexpected answers to what is to be done in contemporary art/dance today, what are the limits of representation, etc.

This film takes place in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Matic lives in a large neighborhood of concrete blocks of flats with his mother. As his father is temporarily working in Libya, they live alone. Matics' otherwise monotonous life changes dramatically when he is chosen to feature in a film. At the shooting he meets Milena, a girl his own age whom he begins to like. When the shooting is over, the film company gives him a present, a huge black Newfoundlander. Although his mother is not really pleased about it, Matic brings the dog home. And that is just the beginning of their adventures...

Nikola spends the summer caught between the violence of the streets and the fragility of his broken home, where he must parent his own mother. He struggles to find a place where he does not feel completely alone.

Tatjana in Motherland is a partly animated documentary essay about Slovenia and its men. It is a “documentary-tale” of how Slovenian society has been disintegrating in an invisible way. The story will unveil a Slovenian Oedipus archetype of the possessive martyr mother type and her relationship with her son, in which she through emotional manipulation, by constantly creating feelings of guilt, burdens her son to such a degree, that he remains dependent on her for the rest of his life. In order to put this relationship to its best use, all Slovenian governing structures have elevated mother figure on the level of a saint and have assigned to it the cultish role. The result of the Slovenian maternal cult is a typical Slovene male, who is pathologically obsessed with his mother.

This film portrays aspects of an Afghan refugee's life - his living conditions in Peshawar and his longing to return to Herat. It is also about Amir's life as a professional musician and his relationships with other musicians in Peshawar.

Life of young Bronja, living in the '70s changed when her mother dies of cancer. After a childhood marked by the loss of her mother, her grown up life is again interrupted by a series of tragic events, which she overcomes with positivism.

Twin brothers make a plan on how to survive the holidays.

Based on an iconic Yugoslavian graphic novel by Kostja Gatnik alias Magna Purga from 1977 the story follows the life of Urban, a man trapped in monotonous daily patterns from birth to death. Years pass relentlessly as Urban grows up and ages, with tireless repetitions persistently dominating his dreary, yet mysterious life like a working machine. However, just before his death, a glimmer of the meaning of life dawns upon Urban.

Peter is the dark brooding type. Leading a vacuous, shapeless life, he longs for the ideal woman, while at the same time, half heartedly continuing with his habitual girlfriend, Marusa , who is considerably older, a fact that Peter is quick to point out. As an aging actress, struggling for parts in her local theatre, she oozes insecurity and breathes uncertainty. Together, they spend their time in the local restaurant, smoking, drinking and trading verbal blows. "I bet you'll just end up a drunk," she tells Peter each time. Peter just grins and tells her how old she looks. Compounded by a thankless director who soon shows her the door, Marusa finds her identity being squeezed harder and harder against the wall. To escape, Peter and Marusa dream...

The creators of the documentary film "Gram srca" entered the world of addiction and accompanied addicts on the streets of Ljubljana, who in interviews confessed their own experience of the harmful consequences of drug use... loss of home, broken and destroyed families, child abduction, prostitution, HIV infections, physical violence, alcoholism...

In the cold atmosphere of a police station, a young couple, Lukas and Anja, endure critical hours after a violent incident in a nightclub where Lukas severely injured another man. Interrogations with a detective reveal the truth about their involvement and stories while they face the consequences of their relationship and moral dilemmas.

Stefan reunites with his family to celebrate his grandmother's birthday for the first time after his mother's recent passing. This homecoming, driven by his urge to complete a film about his mother and an attempt to make amends by rescuing a stray dog, will ignite an introspective journey for Stefan. Inspired by the director's real-life experiences and starring his actual family members in a mission to complete a lake house and a film, this is an intimate cinematic exploration of the timeless mother-son relationship.

In this intelligent mix of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” and Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”, the protagonist Rok loses his memory and is seemingly turning into a better man. Or will his ultra-radical past take over his personality again?

Three friends embark on a road trip like in high school, but things have changed - Gregor is going to war mission, Ziva is going to study abroad, while Andrej is still the same. There are secrets left unsaid. Can their friendship survive?

A police inspector investigates an unusual suicide case. The investigation develops into an obsession, inspector starts living in the apartment of the deceased, digging through his life and gradually taking over his identity.

Two boys take different life paths.

In a small town where everyone knows everybody else, independent researcher Vesna is investigating the death of the director of the local radio station. Although the director evidently committed suicide, Vesna, who has uncovered evidence of a conspiracy, is convinced that he was murdered. When several of the people she has spoken to about the matter find out that the director (Milan) was Vesna's father, they become even more withdrawn about the matter. Will Vesna succeed in unraveling the mystery--despite the many warnings that she should stop trying to uncover the truth?

An documentary film about Slovenian biotherapist and sport coach Marjan Ogorevc.

The story of a few untrained construction workers from poor underdeveloped parts of the country, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina or Macedonia, who carry out seasonal work in the highly-developed republic of Slovenia. Far from home, problems arise for the men - with their families, alcohol, the local population's derision and the "real Slovenian workers".

It was only a card game in the beginning, but then it turned out to be a crime thriller. Frank is a man who works in a printing shop, and whose life was paid a visit by an uninvited man. Then he tries to take his wife and 8-year-old daughter to the island of Corsica, but the uninvited man shows up there as well...

As the film opens, the career of George Frideric Handel is in tatters. Invited to Dublin to present the premiere of a new choral work, The Messiah, he can't find singers adequate for the job. A boy who steals a chicken runs into Mr. Handel. The boy's Mother was NOT an employee at the Cathedral, she cleaned and ironed shirts, so the mother "bribes" Mr. Handel with non-starched shirts to save her boy from being in jail. The choir sucks until the washer lady's son is discovered by Handel.

A documentary film dedicated to the art historian and curator Igor Zabel (1958–2005), focuses on Zabel’s work in the field of visual arts from the end of the 1980s until his death.

The year is 37 BC. A young Liburnian Volsus is taken by a Roman unit to help in what at first seems a simple task of collecting taxes, but the encounters with local Illyrian tribes soon lead to unexpected turns of events, as they show more resilience to subjugation than meets the eye. We see their archaic, emotional world of quaint and brutal laws and traditions through the eyes of this youngster, regarded by the Romans as a primitive barbarian, and gradually come to understand that their world is not all that different from our own.

A Slovenian narrative film made out of the eponymous children's show.

Pero is a professional funeral speaker in a small Slovenian town. His unique gift is to make every funeral that extra bit special. Pero just can't help turning his eulogies into witty personal confessions that bring the grieving crowd to tears for all the wrong reasons.

2009, Slovenia. For 30 years, Alija, the miner, has been one of the many Bosnian immigrant workers. Due to the crisis, miners are losing jobs. Alija is sent to check an abandoned mine. His task is to quickly make sure the mine is empty before management sells the company. But in the mine, Alija finds hidden proof of executions after WWII. He is told to stop digging and report the mine empty. He decides to continue, although he is risking his job. Alija discovers thousands of executed people. He informs the police. He found women among the dead. Some of them were civilians, missing persons, just like his sister that was lost in the 1995 genocide in Bosnia. Alija is convinced the victims need to be brought out, identified and buried. But there is no interest in doing that. The mine is proclaimed a WWII military grave and walled in. The dead will stay unburied. Alija loses his job and struggles to preserve his dignity.

A film about the phenomenon of 'revenge porn' by linking various clips from the film, series and cartoon landscape.

In Yugoslavia's Livada prison in 1970, inmates led by Keber convince reluctant authorities to let them watch the televised Olympic final basketball game between the home country and the U.S., but taunting guards interrupt the viewing and prod the prisoners to the point of a riot. After a period of a kind of blissful anarchy where the inmates taste freedom, Keber enlists the house "intellectual" Mrak to devise a system of prisoner self-government aimed at forcing reforms on the state.

Seventeen-year-old Iva is in the process of coming to terms with the death of her mother. Influenced by this deep personal loss and by the discovery that she didn't know everything about her mother, she slowly immerses herself into a strange, almost dreamlike world far from reality...

After a night of carousing, the amateur photo model Zina heads for a fashion shoot in the nature, accompanied by the ambitious Mia, apathetic Dragica and snobby photographer Blitcz. On the idyllic location, a supposedly ordinary fashion shoot soon turns into a fierce fight for survival.

It presents a fragmented glimpse into the life of people on the move hiding in the unofficial camps in the forests on the EU border.

NATO prepares a global plan as a protection of Central Europe, which is why they set up an aerial defense system in Slovenia named as The Patriot. International terrorist organization attempts to destroy it together with the nuclear power plant. An ex-criminal who's in charge of The Patriot, tries to prevent this catastrophe and also stop the internal enemies.

A desperate painter struggling with artistic and financial survival pawns his beloved grandfather's couch, the last item of any worth in his possession. The apparently-mundane action propels him into a peculiar journey, irreversibly shattering his false values and changing his view of reality.

A man wanders through his life. Everything seems the same, but signs of life appear in the most unexpected places.

Among the many dramatic episodes of the siege of Sarajevo in the years 1992 to 1996, the story of a human safari has remained concealed from the public eye. Few people knew that those fighting the war on the Serbian side were not only the Bosnian Serb Army, volunteers and mercenaries but also a small, clandestine group: wealthy foreigners who paid high fees for the chance to shoot at the residents of the city under siege.

Video work tells a story of an art collector as remembered by herself in her old age, and as narrated by her friend, a psychoanalyst. Through this narrative the authors deal with the spirit of avant-garde art in the first half of the 20th century. By layering black and white and color images and sounds the work creates a deep and lively emotional space.

Private detective Emil Marlovsek can boast a wealth of solved cases of run away and lost dogs. He is assisted in his work by his secretary Beba and Milivoj, a retired officer of the Yugoslav National Army. One evening, Emil encounters the beautiful Sara in the bar where he occasionally plays the piano and falls in love at first sight. The next morning Sara disappears. Not long after he is paid a visit by entrepreneur Grubelic whose wife is missing. Emil soon realizes that she is Sara and immediately starts to search for her. He discovers that Sara is being held prisoner by the mafia, on account of her husband's fishy business involving people in high places. The story's outcome is completely unexpected.

A story set in a Slovenian village during Italian occupation. Stefuc, a man who has been widowed twice and has four daughters, wants to get married for the third time with Zana, who's already engaged and pregnant with Ludvik. Stefuc tries to separate them away, but realizes that he'll have to marry Hedvika, a nice looking girl who has just returned from Milan. In the meantime, Italian fascist authorities decide to eradicate five Slovenian songs with the help of local traitors.

A criminalist explores the background of a business in which the authorities, with the help of an influential corporation want to evict and demolish part of the city and build a new complex there. The film is about the will and power of the individual; the fight against institutions, the individual's engagement, and the decisions made behind the scenes.

Worker Maks Bigec decides to take things in his own hands when he hears that his factory will be closed. He takes the factory director as a hostage and demands that the state should reopen the factory.

Two young female friends are spending summer days together while one of them is going through personal changes. In the course of their everyday conversations, deeper layers of yearning are slowly revealed to us.