A Q&A with three filmmakers followed the second part of the World in Short section at the Kinodvor Cinema last night: Dušan Kastelic and Mateja Starič, filmmakers of the dystopic animated film The Box, and Michaela Taschek, director of Doppelganger. Kastelic told Matevž Jerman and Peter Cerovšek, representatives of the Kraken Society for Short Film Promotion, that he had initially wanted to make another film, but then decided to adapt the comic strip he had published in the Delo daily. Kastelic’s movie also features his dream in which he tries to wake up sleeping people who keep shouting at him. He prefers not to analyse the meaning of the story but likes to hear contradictory interpretations of the viewers. While Jerman emphasised the intricate complexity of social criticism, allusions to adolescence and references to Plato’s cave and George Orwell, a good friend of Kastelic interpreted the film as the story of the Messiah, and his mother understood it as an obduction of the Extra-terrestrials.

Michaela Taschek explained that her expressive and “highly moving” work (according to Jerman) Doppelganger was not only a film, but also a “craving process” which raised more issues than she aimed to address. She can watch the film detachedly only now, a year after the first screening and eight months after the first festival.

Her father died when she was 18 and she had felt deeply estranged from him; priorly, she had distanced herself emotionally as the domestic atmosphere was rather strained. She made her intensely personal film in secret, as “talking was never a strong point in my family”. She never stopped having qualms about her family’s reaction to her film. She had never shown it to her mother. She made the film with her friends because it was the kind of film that can only be made with someone you trust completely.

Andraž Jež

Photo Iztok Dimc