The Trieste Film Festival is one of the largest festivals dedicated to Central and Eastern European cinema. The 34th festival’s edition (21 – 28 January 2023) will screen a total of seven feature-length and four short Slovak films.
Minority co-productions The Visitors (d. Veronika Lišková) and Fragile Memory (d. Igor Ivanko) will compete in the Documentary Competition, while Revelation of John (d. Andrej Kolenčík) and Money and Happiness (d. Ana Nedeljković, Nikola Majdak Jr.) will vie for the award in the Short Films section. The Out of Competition section will present Victim (d. Michal Blaško), which had its world premiere last year at the Venice International Film Festival. A special screening awaits the historical feature film Il Boemo (d. Petr Václav). In the section dedicated to children’s audiences, the TSFF of the Little Ones will present the 3D animated film Journey to Yourland (d. Peter Budinský).
In addition to the presentation of the best films made during the year in Central and Eastern Europe, each year there is a retrospective programme, this year dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the independence of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The programme entitled Beyond the Boundaries: The Fringes of Czech and Slovak Cinema was curated to reflect the main trends in the development of Czechoslovak cinema from 1930s to 1960s. Karel Plicka’s ethnographic documentary The Earth Sings (1933) will present the Slovak countryside of the 1930s, while Dušan Trančík’s short film Photographing the House Dwellers (1968) will bring together the most beautiful and the most tragic moments in the life of a rural family. The short film Old Shatterhand Came to See Us (1966) gives a sarcastic report on living in an enclosed reservation behind the Iron Curtain, and the documentary Pictures of the Old World (1972) presents vivid portraits of old people from the Slovak regions of Liptov and Orava. Both films were directed by Dušan Hanák.
