#kinoteka

KINOTEKA—Polish Film Festival

Satan Said Dance (2017), Dir. by Katarzyna Rosłaniec

Slovenska Kinoteka, Ljubljana

13 March 2018

9.8m/s, Davorin Marc, Slovenia, 2015, 4 min.

Some of the Sensations, Péter Lichter & Bori Máté, Hungary, 2017, 4 min.

Unknown Energies, Unidentified Emotions, Dalibor Barić, Croatia, 2015, 40 min.

The End of Time, Milcho Manchevski, United States/Cuba, 2017, 6 min.

The festival Alternative Film/Video was founded in 1982 in Belgrade, Serbia (then Socialist Yugoslavia). At that time the only other film festival explicitly dedicated to alternative, experimental, avant-garde forms of cinema was GEFF (Genre Film Festival) in Zagreb, Croatia (also part of Socialist Yugoslavia), which was structured as a multidisciplinary biennial and which only lasted for four editions through the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Alternative works of cinema could also be seen at the parallel festival MAFAF (Inter-Club Amateur Film Festival) in Pula (Croatia), or in any of the numerous other festivals of non-professional kino club production in Yugoslavia during the time, but these works would have been mixed in with narrative fiction, non-fiction, and animation. Alternative Film/Video was in fact organized by Academic Kino Club in Belgrade and championed many club productions in general, but its primary purpose was to serve a wider need in presenting film art and video art.

If one considers the larger European context, the pioneering festival of experimental cinema was what eventually became known as EXPRMNTL in Knokke, Belgium, which began as a section within the World Festival of Film and Fine Arts in 1949, and which was organized intermittently as an integral festival from the late 1950s into the early 1970s. This fact would seem to position Alternative Film/Video as the oldest festival of avant-garde cinema in Europe that is still in operation – though it was put on hiatus for a decade in the 1990s during the Yugoslav Wars. After it was re-established the film festival scene and film culture in general looked quite different on the continent. One might even say that the golden age of film festivals had passed and the over-proliferation of festivals was dawning along with the 21st century.

Alternative Film/Video was founded with a strong national focus, as a way to support and expose Yugoslav film and video artists. This does not mean that international artists and curators were not invited to present programs. Still, with the passage of decades and the ultimate disintegration of the country the international profile of the festival increased. Today it is known as an event with a global selection, though it has always maintained a deep regional tie with the Balkan and Central European spaces, which gives the festival its distinct character and allows it to offer works not often seen at larger, more commercial, more Western-oriented festivals.

This program is a brief sampling of contemporary works from this region that have won awards at Alternative Film/Video, and which introduce an ‘other’ European cinema that is unique and vibrant and with a proud history behind it. This cinema must be fully accounted for if a more complete picture is to be drawn of the European avant-garde of today. Péter Lichter, a young artist from Hungary, has been making films with archival footage for the past ten years. Only recently he began co-directing with the Hungarian artist Bori Máté, who brings a painterly approach to their collaborative work. Dalibor Barić, a mid-career artist from Croatia, is known for making visionary animated experiments. Like Lichter, he is a multiple award-winner at Alternative Film/Video over the years. Davorin Marc, an artist from Slovenia, has kept up an incredible pace of activity since the 1980s when he first began showing his work at Alternative Film/Video. He has also won multiple awards at the festival and can be considered something of an unsung hero of ex-Yugoslav and European alternative cinema. Milcho Manchevski, an artist from Macedonia, is perhaps more known for his challenging feature-length narrative films of the past twenty years. What is less known is his early and consistent engagement with experimentation in and around cinema, which has proven to be the fertile soil of his and so many of his contemporaries’ multifaceted and exciting careers.

Greg de Cuir Jr

KINOTEKA—Polish Film Festival

Bestia (1917), Dir. Aleksander Hertz 

KINOTEKA—Polish Film Festival

KINOTEKA—Polish Film Festival

Birds are Singing in Kigali (2017), dir. by Joanna Kos-Krauze and Krzysztof Krauze