Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival

The Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival is a specialised competitive festival which focuses on 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, its specific film programme (which usually brings several hard-to-see films and many well-known international guests) attracts a broad national and international interest. The Kino Otok – Isola Cinema Festival is organised by the Otok Cultural Institute and Kinodvor Cinema in collaboration with Izola Centre for Culture, Sport and Events, the Izola Student Club (KIŠD) and Kino Odeon Izola. It takes place in the 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 Izola's Manzioli Square where the evening open-air screenings take place.

Festival 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 by 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 films are selected for the Harvest section and those then compete for the main audience award which brings the winning film paid distribution in the Slovene cinema network. Some of the past winners of the festival are Saratan by Ernest Abdidzhaparov, Granny [Babusya] by Russian director Lidia Bobrova and Full or Empty by Iranian New Wave filmmaker Abolfazl Jalili.

The festival places a great importance on its guests: should they be artists, professional partners, or journalists, the festival considers them simply as "friends". So one of the sections is dedicated to them – the Friends section. Friends of the Kino Otok Festival are given the chance 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 magazine Film Comment Olaf Möller.

The most eclectic festival section is the Open Island section as various views, recognisable poetics and aesthetics, and different creative methods meet within it. Meanwhile the most peculiar section is surely the Silvan Cinema School. Defined as "a space, not a school, a space for experiencing and narrating films, films and life", it is dedicated to Silvan Furlan, the godfather of the festival and founder of the Slovenian Cinematheque.

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

Some notable guests 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, and Young Seok Noh.

Workshops and lectures

Workshops and lectures are also among the events hosted at the Kino Otok Festival. The Happy DV workshop, organised in collaboration with Luksuz Production, DZMP, enables local film enthusiasts to get acquainted with the practical and theoretical secrets of the seventh art and make their own short films. Introduced already in the festival's first year, it has attained quite a success among the regular followers of the festival. Even more successful have been the lectures that follow the films screened in the Silvan Cinema School section. Other similar events have a more occasional character (they are usually linked to visiting guests).

External links

Kino Otok website

Luksuz Productions website

Comment on the festival by Alexis Tioseco

Open letter to the former Slovene minister of culture Mr. Simoniti by Neil Young

Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival

Contents

Festival sections and awards

Workshops and lectures

See also

External links

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