Slovenian productions and awards
Slovenian cinematographic works are few in number, but of undeniable quality. The 1950s brought two works that contributed considerably to the development of cinema in Slovenia. Kekec (1951, directed by Jože Gale), for example, is an adaptation of a mountain story(Kekec nad samotnim breznom) by Josip Vandot, published in the Slovenian magazine Zvonček, in 1924. This adventure film was awarded the Golden Lion for the best film in the youth category in 1952 at the Venice Film Festival. Five years later, France Stiglic directed Dolina Miru(The Valley of Peace). This work about the struggle of two orphans to survive in a Yugoslavia at war, allows one of its actors, John Kitzmiller, to win the prize for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957. The early 2000s brought a wave of awards to Slovenian cinema: No Man's Land (by Bosnian Denis Tanović, 2001) won the Palm for Best Screenplay at Cannes and the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, and Kuh in Mieko(Pain au lait, 2001), a work about the ravages of alcoholism, made a name for itself at Venice and won the Golden Lion for Best Debut Film. More recently, the highly acclaimed Slovenian Girl (2009, about prostitution in Slovenia) screened at more than 70 international festivals, as well as the road-movie Izlet (2011, by Nejc Gazvoda) and Razredni sovražnik(The Enemy of Class, 2013). This drama tells the story of the reaction of a class of young Slovenians to the suicide of one of them and won numerous festival prizes, including the Fedeora Prize at the Venice Mostra that year.
Festivals in number
Although small in productions, Slovenia can nevertheless boast of being the motherland of many film festivals. One of them, however, the Ljubljana LGBT Film Festival , makes history as one of the oldest of its kind still active in Europe. The festival was founded in 1984 on the initiative of the Homosexual Section of the Student Cultural Center of Ljubljana (SKUC). The students organized the first edition, which took place in several places in the capital: KinoSkuc, the Skuc Gallery, the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and Disko. However, since 1994, the festival has been held every year at the end of November at the Kinodvor cinema and at the Slovenian Film Archive. Small anecdote: the dragon being the symbol of the capital, the prize of the LGBT film festival is a pink dragon. Ljubljana also hosts the LIFFe (Ljubljana International Film Festival), a more traditional Slovenian film festival, but of equal quality. Note that in Slovenia, all films are shown in their original version with subtitles, the country having taken the nice initiative to never dub foreign films.
