Days of Ethnographic Film
Background
Ethnographic film, with a history dating back for about a century, is a very specialised sub genre and is as such a rarely seen and hard to find form of video production. To present its uses, horizons and even existence as such outside the specialised, mostly scientific community and the sporadic television broadcasts, the first more ambitiously set public screenings were organised in 2001, when the first Ethnovideo marathon was set up.
It presented current Slovenian ethnographic film productions by institutions such as the Audiovisual Laboratory of Scientific Research Centre (ZRC SAZU), Goriška Museum, Celje Museum of Recent History, Slovene Ethnographic Museum and various amateur associations. A second programme section was also set up which screened only films made by students.
As the marathon evolved and a decent public interest was found, the idea of extending it into an international festival with a much more ambitious scope led into the first edition of the Days of Ethnographic Film in 2007.
Programme sections
The festival has a non-competitive programme which is trying to present s balanced selection of international and local productions. With a preferred film length of 40 minutes, the programme strives to give a dynamic and colourful representation of the various technical and strategic methodologies of the ethnographic film genre. Somewhat following the steps set by its predecessor, the festival divides its screenings into four sections and occasionally also introducing some subsections.
The first section is reserved for student films. Some of them are directly originating from the students faculty studies studies, showing their first steps into the media. Others are already mature works whose focus varies from micro-case studies to the more ambitious and wide ranging projects. The Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Ljubljana is functions as the main nest for learning and practising this craft.
"Research footage" figures as the second section. Formerly called Visual footage with commentary it used to be focused on authors presenting and explaining their work in progress, but has now been renamed and extended under the more encompassing term of Visual ethnography.
Next comes the special programme section, where exceptional focus is given to either extraordinary authors and researchers (for example, the photographer Stojan Kerbler and the visual anthropologist and festival director Eddy Appels), to particular spatial contexts (Barcelona) or to recent films coming from selected countries (Slovakia, Russia, Netherlands). An additional section dedicated to museums was also featured.
The most wide ranging is the main festival programme where about a hundred films have been screened till now, presenting an unbound scope of themes such as non material cultural heritage, social tensions, particular social groupings, political activism and artistic practices. As each year there are more and more applicants sending their films, the diversity and quality of presented ethnographic films is also rising.
The Niko Kuret Award
Niko Kuret was an ethnologist who has, back in 1950s, set the foundations for the scientific use of film in Slovenia. During the festival, the Niko Kuret Award is given by the Slovene Ethnological Society to individuals whose contributions has made a mark in the field of ethnographic film and visual anthropology in general.
Till now, the award was given to Herta Maurer-Lausegger, Boris Kuhak, Andrej O. Župančič (posthumously), Allison Peters Jablonko and Asen Balikci. The festival also featured a selection of film works by these prominent and innovative researchers and pedagogues.
- Slovene Ethnological Society
- Slovene Ethnographic Museum
- Scientific Research Centre (ZRC SAZU), Slovene Academy of Science and Arts