Award winners of the 23rd Festival of Slovenian Film were announced on 11 October at the closing ceremony in the Grand Hall of the Hotel Union, Ljubljana.
BADJURA LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Jury: Karpo Godina, Varja Močnik, Dušan Moravec, Aleš Pavlin, and Olga Toni. The Metod Badjura Award for lifetime achievement in cinema goes to animation filmmaker Konrad (Koni) Steinbacher.
VESNA AWARDS
Jury: Katja Colja, Siniša Gačić, Matic Majcen, Polona Petek, and Maja Sever.
1. Vesna Award for Best Feature Film
The jury decided not to present this award
2. Vesna Award for Best Feature-length Fiction Film
Don’t Forget to Breathe
Production: Bela Film, Ida Weiss
Co-production: Quasar Multimedia, Studio Dim, RTV Slovenija, RAI Cinema
Directed by: Martin Turk
Commentary: Don’t Forget to Breathe pulls us into a story of two young brothers that find themselves at a turning point. The reason why the director Martin Turk ventured into the youth film genre was to take a story for youngsters to a higher level and make it an auteur film. This was a successful attempt. In many aspects of filmmaking, Don’t Forget to Breathe is a perfectly complete film which the jury had no trouble recognising as the best film in this year’s selection of feature-length fiction films.
3. Vesna Award for Best Director
The jury decided not to present this award.
4. Vesna Award for Best Screenplay
The jury decided not to present this award.
5. Vesna Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role
The jury decided not to present this award.
6. Vesna Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role
Primož Bezjak / Antigone – How Dare We!
Production: Sever&Sever, Nina Jeglič
Directed by: Jani Sever
Commentary: Primož Bezjak enters his role of the famed character of ancient Greek drama by being deliberately archaic, while coming across as modern and worldly. His hypnotic presence culminates in the scene where he stares ferociously through the camera, primarily at Antigone but also into the eyes and soul of the viewer, making them question their relationship with the world they live in.
7. Vesna Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role
Katarina Čas / Paradise – A Second Life
Co-production: A Atalanta (SI), Pilgrim Film (IT)
Directed by: Davide del Degan
Commentary: Katarina Čas conquers her foreign-language role with incredible ease and fascinating self-possession. Even though her creative decisions in acting seem to be guided by the principle “Less is more”, her warmth disarms not only the protagonist, but also the audience. Despite her subtle expression, Katarina Čas creates a full-blooded female character.
8. Vesna Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role
Gojmir Lešnjak / Let Him Be a Basketball Player 2
Production: Gustav Film, Frenk Celarc
Directed by: Boris Bezić
Commentary: Gojmir Lešnjak approaches his role very seriously despite this being a genre film, and although this frame of reference could easily push him too far, Lešnjak always stops just before this happens, administering gags with disciplined precision. Even if this is a supporting role, Lešnjak compellingly conjures up the entire array of emotions from malice and vengefulness to affection for the main characters, demonstrating once more that there are no big or small roles.
9. Vesna Award for Best Cinematography
Radislav Jovanov – Gonzo / Don’t Forget to Breathe
Production: Bela Film
Co-production: Quasar Multimedia, Studio Dim, RTV Slovenija, RAI Cinema
Directed by: Martin Turk
Commentary: The cinematographer paints the remote countryside, where the protagonists
are growing up, in subdued colours, and it is precisely their unobtrusiveness that subtly
highlights the fierce yet repressed emotions of the main character and the delicate
attachments that are growing and being torn between the brothers. All that remains unsaid
but is gnawing at the protagonist, triggering his outbursts, can not only be deciphered but
quite literally felt through the details of the sunlit, lush yet taciturn nature.
10. Vesna Award for Best Original Music
Marjan Šijanec / Exemplary Behaviour
Production: Rasa Miskinyte, Martichka Bozhilova, Edoardo Fracchia
Co-production: Casablanca Film Production (SI), Era Film (LT), Agitprop (BG), RTV Slovenija (SI)
Directed by: Audrius Mickevičius and Nerijus Milerius
Commentary: Throughout this documentary about lifelong inmates, its original music sustains the hopelessness of the situation these convicts have found themselves in, invoking anxiety when the viewer is first faced with the murderers, uilding up tension along the narrative arc and, with a crescendo near the end, ultimately eliciting forgiveness.
11. Vesna Award for Best Editing
Miloš Kalusek / Antigone – How Dare We!
Production: Sever&Sever
Directed by: Jani Sever
Commentary: In a hybrid form, the editing in Antigone – How Dare We! strikes a balance between chaos and order, making a complex three-dimensional narrative into a functional whole. Boldly combining shots, it defines the narrative arc of the work that manages despite its feature-length form and inner complexity to hold the viewer’s attention and make them question the present situation in society.
12. Vesna Award for Best Production Design
Niko Novak / Paradise – A Second Life
Co-production: A Atalanta (SI), Pilgrim Film (IT)
Directed by: Davide del Degan
Commentary: The film is set in a mountain village that, with its deserted pub, winding empty streets and crossroads that lead nowhere, embodies the hopelessness and absurdity of the situation the protagonist has found himself in. The production designer deliberately highlights the protagonist’s sense of confinement through emptied-out, impersonal hotel rooms where time seems to have stopped and the hope which the protagonist tries to have for his future is both genuine and as fabricated as the neon-lit sites of his life decisions.
13. Vesna Award for Best Costume Design
Polonca Valentinčič / Paradise – A Second Life
Co-production: A Atalanta (SI), Pilgrim Film (IT)
Directed by: Davide del Degan
Commentary: One realises that costume design is one of the essential elements of expression in Paradise – A Second Life as soon as Calogero, safely hidden behind a mask, can breathe somewhat more freely for the first time, after arriving in a place where he is supposed to start a new chapter in his life. This, however, is a highly contradictory chapter: both the protagonist and his antagonist can only survive if they remain hidden – in plain view. The costumes that
the designer puts on the two characters layer after layer work not only as protection against the cold, but as camouflage for the adversaries in this tragicomical battle for survival.
14. Vesna Award for Best Make-up
The jury decided not to present this award.
15. Vesna Award for Best Sound
Sašo Kalan and Tom Lemajič / Apples
Co-production: Boo Productions, Lava Films, Perfo d.o.o.
Directed by: Christos Nikou
Commentary: From the very first scenes of Apples, its soundtrack takes the viewer into the inner world of the protagonist and locks them into his emotional states until the very end, making their experience of the film an emotional journey. The sound allows for narration beyond words and cinematography, thus representing a crucial aspect of this remarkable work.
16. Vesna Award for Best Documentary
Antigone – How Dare We!
Production: Sever&Sever, Nina Jeglič
Directed by: Jani Sever
Commentary: Antigone – How Dare We! is a film that goes beyond the usual dividing line
between fiction and documentary. With its formal and intellectual complexity, it makes a
thought-provoking creation, grandiosely raising some of the issues that extend far beyond
Slovenia’s borders. As this kind of ambition is rarely seen in the works produced in Slovenia,
the jury presents the film with the Vesna Award for Best Documentary – and this should be
merely the start of its successful international run.
17. Vesna Award for Best Short Film
Bits
Production: A Atalanta (Barbara Daljavec)
Directed by: Áron Horváth Botka
Commentary: A short film can speak to the viewer as a fragment of a larger whole, or as a carefully crafted miniature. With Bits, the director Áron Horváth Botka managed to create a work that brilliantly demonstrates the full potential of the short format, thanks to compelling directorial and acting performance and an extraordinary emotional effect that is perfectly comparable to that of a feature-length drama. Bits is one of the short films where there is nothing to add or take away, a film that achieves its full potential exactly as it is.
18. Vesna Award for Best Minority Co-production
Apples
Co-production: Boo Productions, Lava Films, Perfo d.o.o. (Aleš Pavlin, Andrej Štritof)
Directed by: Christos Nikou
Commentary: In the past decade, Greek cinema has made an extraordinary international breakthrough, and Slovenia is now part of the so-called Greek Weird Wave through a minority co-production. With its narrative ambiguity, Apples is on a par with the pivotal works of this wave, while the bold visual and narrative methods employed by the director Christos Nikou go deep into the core of the human pursuit of one’s own identity.
19. Vesna Award for Best Animated Film
The jury decided not to present this award.
20. Vesna Award for Best Student Film
Playing
Production: FAMU
Directed by: Lun Sevnik
Commentary: Lun Sevnik’s Playing illustrates that a narrative can strike emotionally even when it is cold, dispassionate, and aloof. Two boys planning suicide before our very eyes arouse shock, angers, and helplessness. The jury recognises Playing as a bold, challenging film whose provocative methods elicit a strong emotional response. This is a skill, something only great masters of cinema can achieve.
21. Vesna Award for Best Original AV Work
Vesna Goodbye
Production: Cvinger film
Directed by: Sara Kern
Commentary: In Vesna Goodbye, the director Sara Kern shows a short period in the life of a 10-year old girl who is forced to grow up far too quickly after her family is upended by a tragic event. The story can be seen as a fleeting glimpse or an open-ended drama – whatever the case, the jury finds the film, despite its short format, compelling to the point that it would have easily considered it for awards in feature-length film categories if the rules allowed it. As it is, the Award for Best Original Work should be seen as encouragement to continue building on the promising narrative landscape the filmmaker has so far been developing in her short films.
22. Vesna Award for Special Achievement
Breakthrough
Production: Narayan Produkcija
Directed by: Dejan Babosek
Commentary: Small market films have a difficult time making it without public funding. The filmography of Dejan Babosek demonstrates time and time again that a noteworthy feature can be made by pursuing an entirely independent path. The jury gives a Vesna Award for Special Achievement to Breakthrough for making a good example of alternative film production in Slovenia by employing an independent funding model.
23. Vesna Award for Special Achievement
Gmajna
Production: UL AGRFT
Directed by: Sebastian Korenič Tratnik
Commentary: Making a feature-length student film is hard, and making a good feature-length student film is even harder. Sebastian Korenič Tratnik achieves nothing less than that. Gmajna provides a heart-breaking insight into life in Slovenian countryside, a life that modernity has literally cut in half, dehumanising and alienating it, reducing it to memories and anecdotes. The extraordinary sensibility of the director in giving the voice to people who have been unfairly pushed to the brink and relegated to the past, is more than enough reason to present the young filmmaker with a Vesna Award for Special Achievement.
24. Vesna Audience Award
Breakthrough
Production: Narayan Produkcija
Directed by: Dejan Babosek
Average score: 4,72
OTHER AWARDS
Award presented by the Association of Slovenian Film Critics FIPRESCI to best Slovenian
feature film in the Official Competition
Jury: Marko Stojiljković, Veronika K. Žajdela, and Peter Žargi.
Antigone – How Dare We!
Production: Sever&Sever, Nina Jeglič
Directed by: Jani Sever
Commentary: The film takes a dynamic approach merging documentary and fiction. This makes Antigone – How Dare We! come across not as an essay, but as a portrait or at least an outline of some of the socio-political developments of the present age, a time full of paradox and hypocrisy. With a telling selection and clever editing of the archive material, the director compensates for the crudeness of the pay and the metafictional aspect, thus pointing to the challenges in interpreting Antigone in the light of the pressing issues, while exploring how Antigone and Creon can speak to us today. Sceptical and ironic, yet never farcical, Antigone – How Dare We! raises more questions than it gives answers, mostly managing to avoid the generalisation and simplification often pervading the artistic and cultural expression today.
Award presented by the educational programme Sharpening the Gaze, run by KINO! Society for Expanding Film Culture, to best student film in the Official Competition
Gmajna
Production: UL AGRFT
Directed by: Sebastian Korenič Tratnik
Commentary: Idyllic images of landscape are disturbed by a persistent, irritating sound of the
motorway that divides the old community of Gmajna. With a special sensitivity to the village
population, the film is a subjective account of the history of a place that seems to be
disappearing.
Playing
Production: FAMU
Directed by: Lun Sevnik
Commentary: In his filmmaking exercise, Lun Sevnik employs a series of unconventional decisions in the protagonists’ power play to cleverly toy with the viewer. With its calculated suspense, use of social media, “video” as the high point, carefully made concept, etc., the film comes dangerously close to a masterpiece!
Award presented by the Festival of Slovenian Film to best short film about Covid-19 lockdown
What Day Is It?
Directed by: Luka Marčetić