Yesterday, the Liffe cinema-goers had the unique opportunity to meet the crew members of the Austrian-Slovenian co-production The Woods Are Still Green by Marko Naberšnik. The filmmaker addressed the audience before the screening in the company of the Festival Director, Simon Popek. There ensued a Q&A session with the film crew: sound engineer Matjaž Moraus Zdešar, editor Jan Lovše, make-up artist Luka Luka Simšič, costume designer Janeta Čoh, scriptwriter Miha Ferkov, cinematographer Miloš Srdić, co-producers Andrej Štritof and Aleš Pavlin, producer and co-scriptwriter Robert Hofferer, actors Aap Lindenberg (who played the general), Simon Šerbinek (who portrayed Jan Kopetzky) and Michael Christoph (who played the main protagonist Jakob Lindner) and scriptwriter and director Marko Naberšnik.

The popular director said about his third feature film that he feels greatest nervousness when presenting the film to home audiences, while the moderator Damijan Vinter explained that Hofferer came up with the idea about relating an intimate story from the WWI. In writing the script, they drew heavily from the war documents, especially letters which greatly inspired the cinematic narration. To Naberšnik the letters revealed a surprising piece of information: despite the industrialised technique of fighting what was most depressing was the feeling of prolonged silence, the gloomy inactivity and the “unbearably empty time”. “They wanted to make the film with a great deal of authenticity and respect for the dead soldiers,” explained Naberšnik. The film drew inspiration from one of the last poems by Georg Trakl, whose prevailing mood of cruelty the filmmakers aspired to instil into the cinematic idiom. The title is taken from a letter by an anonymous soldier, who wrote that the streams were red with blood yet the woods were still green.

Simon Šerbinek commented on his character with a paraphrase of an excerpt from The Plague by Albert Camus: “All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. If, by making that statement, I, too, become the carrier of the plague-germ, at least I don’t do it wilfully. I try, in short, to be an innocent murderer. You see, I’ve no great ambitions.” 

Andraž Jež

Poto: Iztok Dimc
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