It could be said that there are too many people in the world, just as there are too many film festivals. However, the birth of a baby is generally a cause for celebration, and so is a new film festival. The youngest film festival in the world was born on October 14th in Koper, a pleasant Slovenian seaside resort on the Adriatic not far from Trieste. The Fedeora jury, made up of me, Dejan Duric, a film critic from Croatia; and Tomislav Sakic, the executive editor of the only Croatian film magazine, Hrvatski Filmski Ljetopis, decided on Gainsbourg, a first feature by the graphic artist Joann Sfar, for ‘its original and imaginative approach to the biographical picture genre, and its brilliant casting and atmospheric recreation of an era.’ Read the article by Ronald Bergan
The only actual Mediterranean film screened in Koper was the Italian Baarìa – La porta del vento by Giuseppe Tornatore of Cinema Paradiso fame. Baarìa is a pleasant movie (more movie, than a film, we could say), despite its duration (150 minutes) and consequential failures in the rhythm. Although there is a feeling that it is no more than an old-fashioned composite of already seen motifs and pictures from Cinema Paradiso, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento /1900/, and similar films, the story of a family and its protagonist’s travails through Italy’s political history of 20th century adds a feel-good, sentimental side to it, but it also gives a strong impression that it belongs to the kind of cinema we seem to have lost. Read the article by Tomislav Sakic
