Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival

The Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival is a specialised competitive festival which focuses on a contemporary film production from the so called third world cinematographies - Asian, South American, Middle East, Eastern European and African. It was launched in 2004 and although it is a relatively small festival it's specific film programme (which usually brings several hard to see films) and many well known international guests are attracting a broad national and international interest. The Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival is organised by the Otok Cultural Institute and Kinodvor Cinema and in collaboration with Izola Centre for Culture, Sport and Events, Club of Students from Izola and Kino Odeon Izola. It is taking place in a small coastal town of Izola around the second weekend of September. The festival's principal venues are the Kino Odeon Izola, the Izola Cultural Centre and the Manzioli square.

Festival's sections and awards

The Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival has 7 sections and one of those, the main Harvest section, is competitive. Still the Kino Otok festival is not a classical competitive festival since it doesn't have a proper jury. The winning film is namely selected calculating the average vote from all the votes for a single film (whoever buys a ticket can vote) and the film with the higher average vote is the winner. Traditionally five film are selected for the Harvest section and those are competing for the main public award which brings the buying-off to the winning film and a later distribution in the Slovene cinema network. Some of the past winners of the festival are Saratan by Ernest Abdidzhaparov, Granny by Lidiya Bobrova and Full or empty by Abolfazl Jalili.

The festival is giving a great importance to it's guests: should they be artists, professional partners or journalists, the festival is calling them simply as "friends". So one of the sections is also dedicated to them - the Friends section. It is giving a chance to the friends of the Kino Otok festival to bring their friends and films - with no limitations. Among the standard members of the Friends "gang" are the British film critic Neil Young, the director of the Innsbruck film festival Helmut Groschup and the Germany-based critic of the Film Comment magazine Olaf Möller.

The most eclectic festival section is the Open Island section as in it different views, recognizable poetics and esthetics and different creative methods meet. Meanwhile the most peculiar section is surely the Silvan cinema school. It is defined as "a space, not a school, a space for experiencing and narrating films, films and life," and it is dedicated to Silvan Furlan, the godfather of the festival and founder of the Slovenia Cinemateque.

The remaining three sections are: Doc focus section which concentrates on documentary approach and offers a set of documentaries questioning current social topics; Island Animateque section where the animated films from the children's programme Red Elephant are shown; and the Video on the beach section in which young and unknown (and mostly Slovene) authors are presenting their short works.

Some of the guest of the festival from the past years are Lisandro Alonso, Pablo Trapero, Abolfazl Jalili, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Tsai Ming-liang, Nishtha Jain, Albertina Carri, Darren Dean, Young Seok Noh and many others.

External links

Kino Otok website

Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival

Festival's sections and awards

See also

External links

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