Forum Ljubljana

The year is 37 BC. A young Liburnian Volsus is taken by a Roman unit to help in what at first seems a simple task of collecting taxes, but the encounters with local Illyrian tribes soon lead to unexpected turns of events, as they show more resilience to subjugation than meets the eye. We see their archaic, emotional world of quaint and brutal laws and traditions through the eyes of this youngster, regarded by the Romans as a primitive barbarian, and gradually come to understand that their world is not all that different from our own.

The Parade, in a tragicomic way, tells the story about ongoing battle between two worlds in contemporary post-war Serbian society - the traditional, oppressive, homophobic majority and a liberal, modern and open-minded minority... The film, which deals with gay rights issues in Serbia, features footage of the 2010 Belgrade gay pride parade. The film introduces a group of gay activists, trying to organize a pride parade in Belgrade.

Two married couples from opposite social classes are brought together in a single night following a tragic event that will change the rest of their lives.

Tragedy doesn’t come any more Dickensian in tone or Shakespearian in scope than this dark social drama of the disintegration of a little family of four. A series of small debts triggers the swift domino effect that unleashes chaos on a well-meaning working class dad who has the bad judgment to speak truth to power.

Three stories about the impact of three God's miracles in the medieval sense that happen to the film's heroes living in a post-communist society that, after half a century of atheism, re-learns about Christianity.

Haunted by his dark past, a labourer in a small Croatian village has a series of fateful encounters over the course of a single night.

After his wife's death a middle-aged man and his friends become increasingly agitated and violent towards the suburbs they inhabit.

It reconstructs the lively bustle of the Ljubljana subculture scene in the 80s, and it was made by two insiders. With minute and swift editing of the picture and sound, the makers compiled a number of documents and video shots made between 1982 and 1988.

Urbanity is finally erased by mythical rituals, which is determined by the very title of the video film: menhir, an upright stone block from the Neolithic, which was used for sacral rites. Man and woman are Adam and Eve, created in front of us by electronic transformation (morphing) and marked by blood. This element also marks all other elements of the video image: the murder of an individual by the menhir or trinity (politics, church, army), the bodies of the dancer. Blood, murder and death are overcome by only the second basic element: the stone, which is flooded with blood the very next moment. The fight of natural elements is also served by electronic tricks that turn power holders from flesh and blood into stone and wrong.

An animated folkloristic Western, using clichés, local stereotypes and national myths to sketch a kind of satirical profile of “wild” Slovenia, its colourful costumes and strange customs. Boris Dolenc has adapted a cartoon by Vladan Nikolić, who in turn drew on the motifs and visual language of the painted beehive boards typical of Slovenia.

The burglars Sergej and Polde steal a valuable painting, Landscape No.2. By coincidence Sergej also takes a mysterious document dating back to the end of the World War II. Instructor is ordered to recover the stolen painting and the document, which triggers a diabolic mechanism of the past.

The author continues with her main themes: the relationship between man and woman, the intrusion of the mythical into the rituals of everyday life. This video uses many electronic image processing options. Most fascinating are the scenes with "morphing" (electronic transformation), in which the character on the canvas is transformed into an identical figure on the video surface, or the latter "freezes" into a character in a still image. Once again, the author insists on a real natural environment, which deforms it and thus equates it with the artificiality of the video image.

Video work tells a story of an art collector as remembered by herself in her old age, and as narrated by her friend, a psychoanalyst. Through this narrative the authors deal with the spirit of avant-garde art in the first half of the 20th century. By layering black and white and color images and sounds the work creates a deep and lively emotional space.

In the video works of Ema Kugler, mythology is inscribed in the rituals of everyday life, this time it is the theme of Hydra with many faces. It is illustrated by individual scenes with actors in leather costumes (the author's creations), which restrict their movement and thus already emphasize the separation of man from nature. The last trace of connection - the ritual relationship between man and bull, which is again based on human cruelty to animals - ends with blood, which on a symbolic level also pervades the whole image.

Tajga was shot after the performance of the same name, performed at the international festival of contemporary arts City of Women in October 1995 in Ljubljana. The viewer enters a dark atmosphere dictated by dramatic vocal-electronic music, passing anthropomorphic and waxy zoomorphic figures, and camera movements. When the author establishes the landscape, she places a wrestler and a drowning woman in it, and with these scenes she further increases the suspension. At the height of the dramaturgy, the set stage collapses. The waxen guard dogs dissolve and the soldiers retreat. Naked female characters appear, announcing the transition to a period of warmth and peace, accompanied by softer music.

The author constantly depicts the duality of human nature: the same horror occurs in both the mythical and the real world. She illustrates all this with the use of electronic tricks that can, for example, petrify a human face or wall up a human being in just a few seconds. With an electronic trick, even human figures dressed in extravagant costumes return to nature: a man in a costume reminiscent of a bird turns into a real bird. At the same time, the scenes are shot from a bird's eye view, which, as always, emphasizes man's smallness and his loss in his own world and nature.