At the Documentary Film Festival (FDF) in collaboration with Dialogi magazine, a round table on Slovenian documentary film was held, in which Majda Širca, Maja Weiss and Marija Zidar took part.
The conversation was conducted by a film publicist Matic Majcenalso co-editor of the current thematic issue Dialogi on the topic of Slovenian documentary movie. In it they are interviews with several directors of Slovenian documentary films and only one director. Marija Zidar, director of the award-winning documentary Forgiveness, explained that women dominate in this field throughout Europe.
This field is feminized because the lower the pay, the worse they are working conditions, which are most often precarious. A recent European survey of the film landscape also showed that the number of female directors decreases dramatically in the case of big-budget feature films. The Slovenian Film Center allocates total funds of 700,000 to documentary films per year, noting that the value of low-budget movie estimated at 250,000 euros.
After the creation of the movement Me Also they areas Zidar said, the sales agents were looking for a specific product with the director and protagonist in the midst of a radical form of patriarchy. The possibilities are very narrow, said Zidar, and at the same time warned how in discourse about the film, men intervene again and again and draw attention to themselves, to their own traumas, to their own problems. A tremendous success movie Grandma’s sex life Urška Djukić should according to Zidar’s story, would make some of his male colleagues, the directors, quite upset, but they take comfort in the fact that it is a trend of female themes, which should it is now slowly drying up.
“Sometimes they are women’s quotas are also needed to move things forward”
However, Maja Weiss and Majda Širca were happy to learn that women are filming more than decades ago. Sometimes they are female quotas are also necessary in order to move things forward, Weiss believed, but she is aware that sometimes it was easier for younger creators. For example, at the age of 22, she herself was given the opportunity to participate in the tender of Slovenian television for the documentary of the month.
On the other hand, the development of technology has democratized the possibility of making films, a problem are, among other things, always money and distribution.
How to popularize a Slovenian documentary film, where to broadcast it, digitization of archives, the issue of copyrights, due to which the archive of RTV Slovenia is fairly closed, they are questions that have been asked for many years and remain unanswered. Moreover, new ones are born. Marija Zidar warned that the survival of the documentary feature can also be threatened by the very popular multi-part documentary series of the largest providers of streaming content.
According to Majda Širac, the promotion of documentary films is a niche that needs to be filled – the current documentary festival moviefrom Maribor DocudocFestival of Slovenian movie in Portorož, occasional placement of films on the Art Cinema Network program and the RTV Slovenia programme they are not enough.
Participants in the round table they are also compared the production conditions from their own experience. Majda Širca built her opus under the auspices of RTV Slovenia, which has both positive and negative sides. With greater certainty that the film will be shot at all, on the other hand, there is a very limited number of shooting days and a clear schedule of the public institute, which does not take into account, to put it plastically, the most suitable light of the sun. Observational the documentary Odpusćanje Marije Zidar, which she created for eight years and recorded the bulk of the material in a good year, would simply not have been possible under the conditions of RTV Slovenia, she said, among other things.
Source: Rtvslo
