12th Kino Otok – Isola Cinema with shifts on screen and under it

During the 1^st and 5^th of June at the 12^th international film festival Kino Otok – Isola Cinema, we’ll be looking into stories whose motor is movement in itself. By experiencing stories of migrations pushed aside – geographical or intimate – individuals, people like us, will unfold from the anonymous masses. For five early summer days, Isola will once again become a film and social venue with a programme of films screening on Manzioli square and other locations.

With festival guests from Africa to Europe

On the 2^nd of June critically acclaimed director Yared Zeleke will present Lamb, the first Ethiopian film to be displayed in Cannes last year, to Isola’s public on Manzioli’s square. The tale of an honest relationship between an animal and a child on Ethiopian’s mountain pastures brings a vision of a different, social, not economic modernisation. Two film stories of Kino Otok – Isola Cinema’s old acquaintances tell the story of African refugees in Europe. Marko Grba Singh’sAbdul & Hamza is a film about two Somalian’s migrants from Africa at the far east of Serbia. Logbook_Serbistan is a doku-drama by the island’s returnee Želimir Žilnik. In it refugees from ruined African, Near and Middle East areas reconstruct frightening and moving scenes from their exodus. Peter Schreiner, another festival guest, talks about the consequences of the refugee crisis through the meeting of a Somalian named Zakarie, who is on the run from the civil war, and an elderly Italian lady Guilia in Lampedusa.

We are also observing European crisis and the identities connected to them. In Eloy Domínguez Serén’s film No cow on the ice, a young Galician filmmaker runs to Sweden because he hasn’t got a job in Spain. Bosnian director Vladimir Tomić spent the year of 1992 in a Copenhagen’s floating hotel where thousands refugees from Bosnia and Hercegovina were stationed. In his film Flotel Europa which will be screened on Manzioli’s square, he will use homemade VHS footage to move us a quarter of a century back in time to the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia and the Bosnian war.

Forward in the past with archive footage

 Documentary maker Alina Marazzi tells the touching story of her late mother with the help of footage her grandfather collected in For One More Hour. Debut guest in Slovenia, the author takes us back in time to the Italian sexual revolution and feminism of the 60’s and 70’s in her film We Want Roses Too.  With the author’s contribution to the omnibus 14 reels, a collective experiment which is also featuring Slovenian direct Davorin Marc, we will be intimately travelling through the city as a film figure and starting point for future thinking.

The ocean will also be on the screen

The sea will also be connecting us to the screen in seaside cinema theatres – we will be watching the fishermen’s’ journey and their determination to preserve their freedom in Joaquim Pinto and Nuno Leonel’s film Fish tail. Director Pinto will also be presented with his self-portrait What now? Remind me, which looks at the world beyond his own mortality after living with HIV for two decades, and his debut feature film Tall stories which tells the story of a growing twelve-year-old boy Miguel, and also talks about unconventional friendships and rising sexuality. However, this film will be a part of Otok In Ljubljana. Dawn will be joining us from the Baltic sea, a tragicomedy on Latvian kolkhoz which is a film based on Eisenstein’s unrealised film project and made by the festival guest Laila Pakalnina.

The entire film and accompanying programme of the 12^th international film festival Kino Otok – Isola Cinema is available on the festival’s web site.