Discoveries from Slovenia World Cinema

In darkness, space becomes distorted. Objects merge, disappear, and transform from one shape to another, losing their clear boundaries.

The idea for this ethnography was born in the 1990s when the artist noticed the increasing number of military personnel traveling to war zones in the Balkans at an airport in Norway.

After a few days of a close-knit life, a wealthy family splits, and everyone goes their own way - the parents take a cruise ship trip, and the son goes to his grandmother's on vacation, where he meets a new love. An unusual relationship develops between the grandmother and the grandson, which he does not like, but the grandmother seems to enjoy the inappropriate connection. The grandson, in love, spends his days happily with his new girlfriend, enjoying a youthful life, which his grandmother finds disturbing. As weeks pass, the grandson's life turns into a nightmare in which unusual moments of domination between the grandmother and his new girlfriend take place.

The kalanchoe is a silent witness to the highs and lows of love between Lora and Bor. How does the harmony of their relationship reflect in this representative of the plant kingdom?

Fishermen hauling in their catch from the sea. The camera follows them in macro images, as well as the sea that gives life. How do the idealised image of the ocean and the workers reality intertwine?

This is a documentary film about long-term street children, living in Kathmandu and two protagonists ex street kid Sushil Babu Chetri and Lalit Shasi who run non-government organization for children in need. Sushil wants to direct street theater with street children as main protagonists, trying to show alternative ways how to help them and how to face this never ending problem. But his task turns out not to be as easy as it seems, facing more problems than he expected. Lalit Shasi, despite the fact that there are no street children in his orphanage, wants to safe three street kids from the street by giving them bed, food and safety in his organization. But he faces the reality of the street and struggle to convince children to choose safety instead of freedom of the street.

A personal narrative about the beginnings of awareness of a non-binary gender identity.

A man is stuck in the same day over and over again during the worldwide epidemic. He tries to solve this problem by himself but finds out that it will be harder than it seems.

Tanja is waiting in line. In a crowded room, her mind wanders away. After 10 minutes of a mixture of memories and fantasies, she returns to reality and purchases a ticket to the next movie.

Ki Ki Do may seem like a tiny helpless chicken, yet he is a brave Japanese samurai with a passion for fine green tea. He has two insect side-kicks at hand (at wing?) to help him protect the forest and its surroundings. This time he helps a piggy damsel in distress. She ate too many acorns, which could lead to terrible consequences. (KVIFF 2024)

We meet the charismatic Pedro Opeka, who in 1989 stepped into a huge dump in the Malagasy capital of Antananarivo, and saw thousands of adults and children living mixed with dogs and pigs and living in appalling conditions. This shook him to the core, and with incredible efforts, perseverance and complete dedication to the poorest, together with his colleagues in the movement, helped thousands of homeless people and garbage collectors to return to life. More than 23,000 of them now live in well-organized settlements with new houses, schools, playgrounds and medical care.

They say that the blues was born from suffering and from a desperate desire to overcome it, through music, through constant aimless travels, drowning in alcohol. If we talk about blues as all this, then Vili Fajdiga's life was a typical blues one. At that time (1920), in Zasavje and Trbovlje, similar social conditions were evidently established as in the American Mississippi Delta, necessary for the birth of blues music. This is a story about a difficult and varied life, creativity, passion, hope, about falls and not always ups and downs, about love for a woman, for music, for life.

This feature documentary celebrates the life of the charismatic defender of the Carpathians and the Soča river, General Svetozar Boroević, the only field marshal of non-German background in the 50-million Austro-Hungarian Empire. One of the finest commanders of World War I died forgotten and destitute on 23 May 1920 in Klagenfurt, aged 63.

In the autumn of his life, forester Anton Prelesnik travels through the autumn forest, where he spent most of his years. The Kocevsko forest is his home. In it, he gave meaning to a turbulent and difficult life that overwhelms too many people's destinies: workers at the once famous Roska sawmill, Kocevje Germans, taking care of the wounded in partisan hospitals, those killed in extrajudicial killings…

In the heart of the Šalek valley, behind a cloud of smoke from the nearby power plant, lies the town of Šoštanj. When Slovenia is supplied with enough electricity and the smoke dissipates, only a few people remain there. This is their story.

An amateur film shot in only 8 days. We follow teenagers who are on their way to becoming adults, even though they are supposed to be adults already. We follow the poetic and sarcastic Selektor, who is followed by his high school friend, who randomly runs into an old acquaintance – Dahi – and Sonja, an intelligent girl in her twenties who lives both in the working world and in the company of those who are supposed to be a kind of elite. A smaller part of the story is also devoted to other characters, about whom we learn as much as we are meant to. We meet James and Maxim, an Englishman who writes tourist stories about Slovenia and a French physicist, whom chance has brought together among the guests of the bar, so that through them we also learn more about the others and vice versa.

Children's games are without boundaries, even between war and play.

A typical day in a typical life of a typical couple trying to communicate their way through their typical relationship.

Uncle Geza goes on a trip to Ukraine following the footsteps of his beloved grandfather Peter Kutos, who fought on the Austro-Hungarian side against the Russians during the First World War. There wouldn't be anything special about this trip, if the bird that announces death, would not begin to scream in the orchard in front of the Kutos family's house. This causes turmoil among the travelers. Nevertheless, they go to Ukraine and it seems that everything will be fine and that this will be just another nostalgic journey of grandchildren's following the footsteps of their grandfathers. Then, in the middle of the journey towards Zaturci, a message from military museum comes up that Peter Kutos could not fight in Zaturci in 1916, since he was called into the army in 1917, a year later. That changes everything. And this will have to be said to Geza.

The thoughts of Mica Olip, 105, with glimpses into her life. Given voice, the thoughts take us to the bilingual villages of south Carinthia. The year is 1976, when the Austrian national government requests that members of minorities be counted across the country, to establish whether a minority is eligible for bilingual place-name signs. The census is broadly boycotted by the Slovenian minority in Carinthia. In a small mountain village of Sele, four boys decide to carry out a unique operation: to hijack the ballot box.

Evening atmosphere at the Tiffany gay club in Ljubljana. Nenad, a security guard, shares his experience of working in the club and how it changed him.

Klara escapes the pressures of the hot summer concrete and the city bustle. A ’93 Toyota, empty road, Peter with a violin case, and the sea. Everyone manages to find their own spot of peace and quiet. When a lot happens, and yet nothing at all.

Inserts from neo-avant-garde films by Emir Kusturica, Zivojin Pavlovic and Zelimir Zilnik made in the so-called Yugoslav film period of the 1970s and 1980s are re-read, re-worked, re-coded in a video story contemplating the role of different media in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the time of world internet communications, cyborg stories and world spread computer nets. If it is true that we all part of a giant hypertext, coded by adapted and shortened CD-ROM histories, then why not try to display the video picture as hypertext, as the one which will show the hidden spots of our history and present?