The press conference announcing the 25^th Ljubljana International Film Festival was held on 21 October at the CD Club. Members of the press were addressed by the Festival Director, Simon Popek, who initially expressed his gratitude to the cinema-goers, the sponsors (this year joined by the Multimedia Centre of the RTV Slovenia) and partners, the cinemas which screen the films throughout the Festival. Simon Furlan, a representative of the Festival’s main sponsor, Telekom Slovenija, stressed the fact that despite celebrating its 25^th anniversary Liffe remains fresh and invigorating, and has been attracting an increasing number of cinema-goers. He also drew attention to the fact that Telekom Slovenija will this year again present the winning film of the Perspectives section with the Kingfisher Award. Simon Popek outlined the 25^th festival’s programme that again features many treats for movie enthusiasts and general public alike. The overriding theme of this year’s festival is “the big screen”, which means that special emphasis will be placed on the cinematic idiom whose precondition for an optimal viewing experience is a movie theatre screening. In line with this motto, this year’s opening film is Playtime by Jacques Tati, a subtle and magnificently choreographed comedy. Igor Prassel introduced the jury that is to select the best short film, an award that a film by Nejc Saje about a Slovenian poet, Tomaž Šalamun, also competes for. The jury is composed of an audio-visual theoretician from Bologna, Paola Bristot, a young Slovenian filmmaker and film publicist, Matevž Jerman, and a freelance journalist and film critic from Belgrade, Vladan Petković.

The Festival’s central section, the Perspectives among others includes a family drama Goodnight, Mommy by Austrian creative duo Veronika Franz (Ulrich Seidl’s wife, who also wrote some of his films) and Severin Fiala. The critics attributed the blood-curdling film fresh from the Venice Festival with a feel for the Hanekesque modern horror. Two American films, Buzzard by Joel Potrykus and Whiplash by Damien Chazelle, provide a thorough critique of the bloated bureaucracy and rigidness of the state system. The Tribe, a debut feature by a Ukrainian director, Miroslav Slaboshpicki, sports an idiosyncratic cinematic idiom conveyed in the sign language of the deaf and dumb with no subtitles or voice over. Casa Grande by Brazilian director Fellipe Barbosa addresses the burning South American topic of class distinction, exploitation and racism in contemporary Brazilian society. A Proletarian Winter’s Tale is a revolutionary critique of the brutal neoliberal oppression of the working classes.

The Avant-premieres section includes some of the widely compelling films most of which have already been purchased for Slovenian distribution. Especially worth mentioning are 20,000 Days on Earth, a documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard about Nick Cave, and Alan Partridge: Alfa Papaby Declan Lowney, a story about an invented character of a radio DJ, the closing film of the Festival. Birdman, a film by Alejandro González Iñárritu, based on the real-life experience of actor Michael Keaton, also tackles celebrity in a special way. Gemma Bovery, a comedy by Anne Fontaine, is an imaginative recasting of Flaubert’sMadame Bovary, The Woods Are Still Green, a Slovenian-Austrian co-production by Marko Naberšnik, is based on a true story from World War I. A visual tour-de-force, Mommy, is the latest film by a talented young Canadian director, Xavier Dolan, a new approach to the biographic picture genre is adopted by Abel Ferrara in Pasolini, a record of the events on the last day of life of an Italian Marxist artist, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Especially noteworthy are also the latest achievement by a legendary Canadian auteur, David Cronenberg, Maps to the Stars, a comical satire on the motion-picture capital of the world, and an inventive mock documentary, The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq by Guillaume Nicloux, in which the scandalous author plays himself.

The Kings and Queens section among others offer Charlie’s Country, director Rolf de Heer’scollaboration with an Australian aboriginal cinematic legend, David Gulpilil, a tale about the gap between the white colonialists and the indigenous people, and a masterpiece Hard to Be a God, a film by the provocative Russian giant Alexei German. Also dedicated to German, this year’s retrospective is to feature, also owing to the Centre of Russian Science and Culture in Ljubljana, a series of films that used to be banned and are still rarely screened at international cinemas. The Tribute section will pay homage to a Swedish director, Ruben Östlund, master of irrational impulsive excesses of frustrated and alienated individuals in the clutches of a brutal system. Panorama of World Cinema among others brings two films whose original cinematic idiom addresses the current Palestinian suffering – Bethlehem, an Israeli-German-Belgian co-production by Yuval Adler,and the Palestinian Omar by Hany Abu-Assad. Let us draw particular attention also to The Look of Silence, a co-production by Joshua Oppenheimer, who last year shocked and overwhelmed the audiences with his brilliant work, The Act of Killing. If the previous year’s brutal hybrid between a documentary and various cinematic and theatre genres featured the Indonesian mass slaughter of communists through the perspective of the massacre’s protagonists, The Look of Silence re-addresses the dark topic by focusing on the perspective of one of the victims, an optometrist Adi Rukun.

Matic Majcen introduced this year’s enhanced Image-Music workshop, conducted by the team of the eponymous online magazine with a view to introducing the cinema-goers to the medium of music video as an autonomous art that has developed a unique, original idiom. In November, the workshop will thus include also a music video by Xavier Dolan, the trial run for the movie Mommy, featured within the scope of the Avant-premieres. The prize-winner of the competitive programme of music videos will be selected by members of the audience by vote-taking.

The 25th Liffe accompanying programme will be most variegated; the four-day multimedia seminar and workshops, Mad about European Film, will provide an insight into European auteur cinema, cinematic means of expression and scriptwriting. Applications until 31 October. The Kinobalon section is dedicated to the festival’s youngest audiences, who can also attend the complimentary Cup of Coffee workshop, which is to keep them busy while their parents are watching a film. The Festival’s central meeting points are the Foyer II of Cankarjev dom where, for example, the Designers’ Society of Slovenia is to hold a chair auction, and the Kinodvor Cafe.

Andraž Jež

Photo: Iztok Dimc
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