Slovak cinema has once again strong presence at the Art Film International Film Festival in Košice. Six Slovak films will compete for prizes, while the festival will commemorate the centenary of multiple Slovak filmmakers and will also host the launch of new book entitled Máme svoj film! Slovenská filmová kultúra a propaganda 1939 – 1945 [We have a film! Slovak film culture and propaganda 1939 – 1945] by film historian Petra Hanáková. The 30th edition of Art Film will take place from June 21 to 28.
György Kristóf’s new film Zenith, produced by Dynamo Productions, will have its world premiere in Košice. A dystopian dance drama about power dynamics that have shaped the political landscape in recent decades not only in Central Europe was selected for the International Competition of Feature Films.
Three Slovak films are up for the awards in the new International Competition of Central and Eastern European Films. The documentary Aquabells from Prandorf, directed by Palo Korec and produced by FilmWorx, will celebrate its first public screening. The film follows five women from the village of Devičany near Banská Štiavnica, who began to harden themselves in the nearby tajch and rebel against gender stereotypes. After the successful premiere at the Berlinale, the film The Editorial Office (dir. Roman Bondarchuk, co-prod. Silverart) will celebrate its Slovak premiere – same as Fakir (dir. Roman Ďuriš, prod. Bright Sight Pictures), which was already screened at Dok.fest München and Docs Against Gravity in Warsaw.
International Competition of Short Films includes an internationally successful film Cold and Dark by Peter Hošták, a Slovak documentary filmmaker based in Canada, about a draft horse named Kubo and his logging community. The second piece in the competition is an experimental film about the boundaries between the analog and digital world Beyond Anachronism: Eons of the Binary (Film) by Claude Johann Čierny.
Seven new Slovak films were selected for the non-competitive Slovak Season section. One of them is a feature-length documentary Returns to Pictures of the Old World about director Dušan Hanák and his famous film from the early 1970s. The documentary was produced by the Slovak Film Institute and directed by Róbert Šulák. The section also includes Kalman’s Day (dir. Szabolcs Hajdu, co-prod. MPhilms), Calm in the Canopy (dir. Michal Hogenauer, co-prod. Silverart), Olympic Halftime (dir. Haruna Honcoop, co-prod. VIRUSfilm), I Don’t Love You Anymore (dir. Zdeněk Jiráský, co-prod. ARINA), Via Slovakia (dir. Víťazoslav Chrappa, prod. FilmWorx) and Villa Lucia – Director’s cut (dir. Michal Kollár, prod. KFS Production). Young audience can look forward to the successful animated feature Tony, Shelly and the Magic Light (dir. Filip Pošivač, prod. nutprodukcia), while the film Footprints: Fighting in Banská Štiavnica (dir. Peter Gašparík, prod. PEGART) will be presented in the Panorama.
As many as 14 Slovak classic films from the archives of the Slovak Film Institute find themselves in the Art Film programme. The festival will commemorate the centenary of five important personalities of Slovak cinema in the Anniversaries with the SFI. The audience can get to know one of the key auteurs of Slovak animation, Vlastimil Herold, through six of his short films: The Apple of Knowledge (1955), Saturday Is Here (1972), Little Mouse Cooked Some Grits (1974), Inventor (1983), The Magician and the Flower Girl (1986), and The Strange Bird (1987). The festival also selected five films from the rich oeuvre of documentary director Vlado Kubenko: [Switch Tower Hell], Modern Indian Painters (both 1967), Kalište (1973), Whittle Again the Wooden Horse of Childhood (1973) and Jozef Kostka (1987).
Director Stanislav Barabáš was also born a hundred years ago and the festival will screen his feature-length debut The Song of the Grey Pigeon (1961). Actor Jozef Kroner will be commemorated by Art Film with the film The Devil Never Sleeps (1956) directed by Petr Solan and František Žáček, in which he played four different characters, while actor Ladislav Chudík will be celebrated with Paľo Bielik’s Captain Dabač (1959). Both actors also appeared in Midnight Mass (1962), directed by Jiří Krejčík, which the festival screen on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising.
Film historian Petra Hanáková will present her new book Máme svoj film! Slovenská filmová kultúra a propaganda 1939 – 1945 [We have a film! Slovak film culture and propaganda 1939 – 1945], published by the Slovak Film Institute. On this occasion, three short films from this period will be screened: Permanent Lights (1940) by Ivan J. Kovačevič, In the White Paradise (1943) by Eugen Mateička and On the Island of Cormorants (1944/1946) by Paľo Bielik.
Suzanne (1996), directed by Dušan Rapoš, will be screened on the occasion of the awarding Maroš Kramár with the Actor’s Mission award.
