Radmila Djurica

Kino Otok Isola may offer new experience of film reviewing, chill out spirit and direct contact with the audience, celebrating the originality of cinematic language, radical contents or unconventional forms. The picturesque ancient town center of Izola in Slovenia is reborn as a true cinema island with its romantic Manzioli Square, with open cinema at its centre emerges as the festival's main attraction. Its thorough selection of the films and an interesting experience of the open cinema within the Mediterranean town, as to follow with outstanding cultural event.

The Kino Otok - Isola Cinema Festival is actually a specialized competitive festival, that focuses on contemporary film production coming from third world cinematography: Asian, South American, Middle East, Eastern European and African. The festival has collaborated with some international festivals from the geographical or conceptual mutual interests, e.g. with the Innsbruck film festival.

The Kino Otok – Isola Cinema Festival has 7 sections and the main Harvest section, is competitive. Still the Kino Otok festival is not a classical competitive festival. The winning film is namely selected by calculating the average vote from all the votes for a single film and the film with the higher average vote is the winner. Five films are selected for the Harvest section and the main audience award winner film is purchased for distribution in the Slovene cinema network. Some of the past winners of the festival are Saratan by Ernest Abdidzhaparov, Granny [Babusya] by Russian director Lidia Bobrova, Full or Empty by Iranian New Wave filmmaker Abolfazl Jalili, Prince of Broadway by Sean Baker, and Taxiphone: El Mektoub by director Mohammed Soudani, Swiss-Algerian co-production.

The festival places a great importance on its guests: should they be artists, professional partners, or journalists. Among the standard members of a film crew are the British film critic Neil Young, the director of the Innsbruck film festival Helmut Groschup, and the Germany-based critic of the magazine Film Comment Olaf Möller. Izola Festival the year 2012 hosts a group of young Serbian authors in cooperation with Cinema City from the film festival in Novi Sad www.cinemacity.org  Otherwise, the whole program is available on the website www.isolacinema.org  Cinema City from Novi Sad in Serbia presents Serbian authors such as Dane Komljen (Bodily Function/Telesna funkcija), Vladimir Blaževski (Punk is not Dead/Pank nije mrtav), among the rest from Novi Sad:Jelena Maksimović, Marko Grba Singh, Milica Tomović, Ognjen Isailović, Ognjen Glavonić, Damir Romanov etc… Also, the prestige guests of festival will be Italian filmmaker Andrea Segre, Rade Sherbegia from Croatia, Yorgos Lanthimos - Greek filmmaker, Ariane Labed from France, Ben Rivers a film director from UK, also Joanna Hogg from UK and many others.