By: J.S., STA
The coastal town of Izola is ready for the 18th iteration of the Isola Cinema International Film Festival, which will take place from 1 to 5 June. Lovers of art film can look forward to 41 carefully picked feature and 71 short films, which will mostly be screened at three open air and two indoor venues in Izola.
Screenings and events are also planned in Ljubljana, Cerknica, Idrija, Sežana and Tolmin, with some already scheduled before the official start of the festival. The festival’s director Tanja Hladnik has told the press that the scope of the programme is comparable again to the pre-pandemic years.
According to selector Varja Močnik, the films chosen demonstrate how much intimate life is intertwined with political developments, with the latter pushing some people to the edge of society.
The official opening film of the festival is Disappearing/Verschwinden/Izginjanje by Andrina Mračnikar, an Austrian filmmaker with Slovenian roots, who addressed the situation of the Slovenian language in Austria’s bilingual province of Carinthia. The film won the audience award at the Diagonale festival in Graz.
The main open air venue films moreover include Luzzu by Alex Camilleri, who portrays the impact of EU regulations on traditional fishing in Malta, The Staffroom by Croatia’s Sonja Tarokoć, who explored the dynamics of the education system, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Love Meetings.
Pasolini’s classic will not be the only trip down memory lane in Izola, as the festival will also join a Ljubljana cinematheque-organised retrospective dedicated to Hungarian director Marta Meszaros.
The festival, which will also host a number of filmmaker guests, will moreover feature a selection of short films by rising independent filmmakers in the relaxed atmosphere of the Video on the Beach section, a programme of films and activities for children, young people and families, and a programme for film professionals.
What is more, this year, Isola Cinema committed to implementing measures for preventing and reducing the amount of produced waste and thus became the first film event in Slovenia to have received the title of a Zero Waste Event conferred by the Ecologists Without Borders association.