IsolaCinema - KinoOtok

Kino Otok 5 Date is Known!

koen — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 10:25:15 +0000

The fifth edition of Kino Otok - Isola Cinema festival will take place from Thursday, May 29th until Monday, June 2nd 2008. So keep those dates available!

NEW ISOLA CINEMA WEBSITE!

walden — Thu, 31 May 2007 18:32:09 +0000

Dear visitors, we are happy to inform you that a completely new Isola Cinema website has been published in May 2007. We kindly invite you to continue your visit there! Needless to say, the new website is the one we will update from now on.

Thanks for visiting our website, maybe you should also consider coming to the festival sometime! To get an idea of what’s going on, visit our web galleries.

Isola Cinema Team

Isola Cinema 4: persistence of vision!

walden — Thu, 03 May 2007 11:47:27 +0000

Dear film-lovers, colleagues and friends,

Below you will find the programme outline of our fourth ISOLA CINEMA film festival, which will take place from Thursday, May 31st until Monday, June 4th in Izola (Slovenia).

The key ingredients of Isola Cinema remain unchanged: set in the small town of Izola (located on Slovenia’s Adriatic coast) this five-day festival offers a relaxed - yet, at the same time, intense - full-time engagement with the Art of Film.

Isola Cinema is a small festival, and wants to remain so. Instead of an overcrowded schedule, we want to offer a certain vision of contemporary cinema, one in which we firmly believe. More than solely screening films, the festival believes that such important works deserve a personal accompaniment. It’s our view that no film-screening is really ‘complete’ without the presence of the film’s ‘author’, and so our policy - and our priority - is to have as many of the directors present as possible.

Under the motto Persistence of Vision, the international film festival Kino Otok / Isola Cinema will proudly open its fourth edition with Bamako by the Malian director
Abderrahmane Sissako. Undoubtedly one of the great poets of
contemporary cinema, Mr. Sissako — whose film has been hailed as one of the major cinematic works of the decade — will honour us with his presence and officially open the festival.

good neighbours

A masterpiece of older vintage — which will be screened on opening night in the picturesque Open-Air Cinema set up in Izola’s central square — will introduce the new section Good Neighbours: Inter-regional Accent. This programme (which will, each year, spotlight each year two authors working in Slovenia’s neighbouring countries) opens with the winner of the ‘Best Debut’ prize at the 1961 Venice Film Festival: Banditi a Orgosolo [Bandits of Orgosolo] by Italian veteran Vittorio De Seta. Mr. De Seta will be joining us later in the festival, when he will introduce his latest work - and the official festival closing film, Lettere dal Sahara [Letters from the Sahara]. As part of our De Seta Focus, Isola Cinema will present brand-new prints of his wonderful short documentaries made in the 1950s. This year’s Austrian entry for the Good Neighbours section, meanwhile, is the intimate documentary Bellavista by Peter Schreiner.

Harvest

The Open-Air Cinema is traditionally the main
stage for Isola Cinema’s Harvest section, in which five films from all corners of the world compete for the Audience Award. The festival guarantees nationwide Slovenian theatrical distribution of the award-winning film. This year’s Harvest opens with Daratt [Dry Season], a film that confirms the talent of another sub-Saharan director, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun. Haroun who received the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, will willingly discuss his work with you in Izola. The competition is completed by: Zapiski putevogo obkhodchika [The Lineman’s Diary] by Zhanabek Zhetiruov (Kazakhstan), Glue by Alexis Dos Santos (Argentina),
Saratan by Ernest Abdyjaparov (Kyrgyzstan), and Jin tian de yu zen me yang? [How is Your Fish Today?] by London-based, Chinese director-novelist GUO Xiaolu.

Silvan’s Cine School

For the second time Isola Cinema will present its educational programme named Silvan’s Cine School in honour of the godfather of the festival - and founder of the Slovene Cinematheque - Silvan Furlan. This programme, organised in collaboration with The Cinematheque Society, has been organised around the theme “I Am the Stage of Cinema”. Featuring works by Jacqueline Veuve (Switzerland) and Boris Lehman (Belgium) – who will both be present at the festival — this series of lecture-presentations will include films by Jonas Mekas (USA), Naomi Kawase (Japan), Victor Kossakovsky (Russia), plus titles from the enigmatic Slovenian collective known as OM Production.

friends

Every year Isola Cinema asks some of our faithful foreign colleagues to invite their filmmaking friends to our ‘Island of Cinema’. Award-winning
writer-director - and another of the festival’s ‘godfathers’ - Jan
Cvitkovič has invited Christopher Coppola (USA) with his
PAH-Fest project, which promises to be a genuine mobile-phone and web-film “festival-within-the-festival”. German-based Film Comment critic Olaf Möller will introduce Nicolas Rey’s Schuss! (France). ‘Kooperativa’ partner and Innsbruck Film Festival director Helmut Groschup is flying over Brazilian filmmaker José Araújo and his film As Tentações do Irmão Sebastião [The Temptations of Brother Sebastian]. Current director of Brussels’ international art-centre De Beursschouwburg, Belgian programmer/curator Cis Bierinckx, has invited Xiaolu GUO with Address Unknown (her How Is Your Fish Today? is part of the Harvest competition). And British film-critic and festival-programmer Neil Young presents Graham Robertson (USA) and his film Able Edwards.

open island

Titles in the festival’s eclectic Open Island section will include:
Manoro [The Teacher] by Brillante Mendoza (Philippines); the new “redux” version of Who Killed Cock Robin? by Travis Wilkerson (USA); the first mobile-phone-shot feature-film Waarom heeft niemand mij verteld dat het zo erg zou worden in Afghanistan? [Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me It Would Become This Bad in Afghanistan?] by Cyrus Frisch (Netherlands); and what will be the last screening of this year’s Izola festival, Kenen joukoissa seisot [Revolution] by Finnish director Jouko Aaltonen.

animation films

The remaining films of the Open Island section will be announced Mid-May. We can, however, confirm that – In collaboration with the Animateka International Animation Film Festival of Ljubljana - curator Igor Prassel will presents highlights of Chinese Contemporary
Animation.

island in ljubljana

In conclusion, we would like to mention that a
post-festival programme called Otok v Ljubljani (Island in Ljubljana) will take place in the capital’s arthouse cinema Kinodvor from June 6^th until 10^th. Besides a selection of the Isola Cinema programme, the event will feature some exclusive events. Amongst them: the first theatrical screening of the winner of the Isola Cinema 2006 Audience Award: Gol ya puch [Full or Empty] by Abolfazl Jalili (Iran), and the much anticipated premiere of Paris-based Slovene director Boris Petkovič’s new film, paris.love.

Apichatp0ng cancels local release of his last film

koen — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 19:40:49 +0000

Apichatpong Weerasethakul (guest at the first Kino otok presenting Blissfully Yours; and whose Wordly Desires was screened at last year’s festival) has cancelled the local release of his last film Syndromes and a Century after Thai censors insisted that four “sensitive'’ scenes had to be cut.

More on Apichatpong’s homepage.

Silver Medal for FC Isola Cinema

koen — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:30:59 +0000

Kino Otok FC — aka FC Isola Cinema– won the Silver Medal at the International Film Festival Futsal Competition in Rotterdam .
After four winning games Kino Otok FC lost in the cup final against the joint Argentinean-Brazilian team.

We congratulate our team and wish it all the best in its preparations for the Isola Cinema tournament scheduled for early June!

FC Isola Cinema in Rotterdam

koen — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:57:19 +0000

Kino Otok FC –aka FC Isola Cinema– kicks off the first International Film Festival Futsal Competition in Rotterdam.
The line-up of the team: Vlado Škafar, Olaf Möller, Mak Kapetanović, Joachim Leitner, Kevin Henry, Stefan Uhrik, Cyrus Frisch and Gertjan Zuilhof.

More at the Rotterdam Film Festival

Matthew Barney: No Restraint

koen — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 09:56:52 +0000

“Go Where the Film Takes You” was the motto of the first Silvan Cine School. As part of this Isola Cinema workshop “intended to cultivate thinking, talking and especially writing about film” we were taken aboard an enormous whaling ship in Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9. IFC Films is now releasing a documentary about Barney’s artistic enterprise, titled Matthew Barney: No Restraint. IndieWire interviewed its director Alison Chernick.

Our People at Cinemart

koen — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:51:57 +0000

The world’s first and largest co-production market, Rotterdam Film Festival’s CineMart, has recently announced its selection of forty-six independent film projects to be discussed in January 2007. Amongst the lucky directors of developing projects we can find many old guests of Isola Cinema (Pablo Trapero, Lav Diaz, Raya Martin) and certainly plenty of names that are yet to become our friends.
More info at http://www.filmfestivalrotterdam.com/

Umrao Jaan vs Umrao Jaan

koen — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 13:33:30 +0000

Last November the biggest filmindustry on the planet released a remake of Umrao Jaan. Directed by J.P. Dutta and featuring an all-star cast, noteably Aishwarya Rai (of course in the leading role), this glamorous superproduction comes exactly quarter of a century after Muzaffar Ali’s intelligent, poetic and simply magnificent cinematic interpretation of the 1905 Urdu novel.

Isola Cinema opened its very first edition with Ali’s 1981 Indian contemporary classic. His Umrao Jaan featured the legendary Rekha (whose song-lyrics were sung by –the no less glorious– Asha Bhosle). During the Izola public talk the director underlined that although it has been labelled a “Bollywood classic”, he has always kept a safe distance from Bollywood. As characteristically expressed on the artist’s homepage (http://www.muzaffarali.com/): ” Muzaffar Ali enriched by the emotional harvest of the response of Gaman and Umrao Jaan has conserved himself from being consumed by Bollywood genre of filmmaking, and is now a symbol of aesthetics and humanity. ”

Khavn Receives 20K Grant

koen — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 10:29:59 +0000

Khavn de la Cruz is one of four directors receiving the ‘20K grant’ for his project MONDOMANILA: HOW I FIXED MY HAIR AFTER A RATHER LONG JOURNEY.
The ‘20K grant’ is the name of a new funding opportunity offered by the Hubert Bals Fund of the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Its intention is to support “low budget digital video productions from developing countries”. The three other projects selected are: AT THE END OF THE DAYBREAK by Ho Yuhang (Malaysia), IN WHAT CITY DOES IT LIVE? by Liew Seng Tat (Malaysia), and WEED by Wang Liren (China).
After a first visit in the summer of 2005, Khvan returned to Slovenia last May to attend the third Isola Cinema festival. This time he came in the company of his filmmaking compatriots Lav Diaz and Raya Martin. Of the latter he accompanied live on piano A Short Film about the Indio Nacional.