10 YEARS OF KINO OTOK IZOLA

10th Anniversary of Kino Otok – Isola, a nice little cinema festival in Slovenia, this year specialised on non-competitive  character, which focuses on contemporary film production from third world cinematographies: Asian, South American, Middle East, Eastern European and African. Launched in 2004 in the small coastal town of Izola. The festival has collaborated with some international festivals such as Innsbruck film festival.

 Film TIR brought to my attention right away as soon as I arrived.  It is a metaphor for the chaos in the seemingly united Europe of equal rights". This is a feature debut of the director Alberto Fasulo, who got tired of  shooting documentaries, to depict reality through fiction. TIR is a Croatian-Italian co-production showing the lives of truck drivers. They follow  of same old routes, the film is  an insight into the driver's life on the road. At first, the film was designed to be a documentary, which is why actor Branko Završan got acquainted with the drivers' everyday life by obtaining a truck driver's permit and working in transport services. Irena Urbič, comprises an "intimate and social drama, a flattened fresque painting of borderless Europe in which man is but a machine, an alienated voice, moving in line with the instructions of another machine, the voice of the employer. And it drives, drives, drives from nowhere to nowhere." 
 

The Friday film last night on the Manzioli Square was a treat due to a new specialties. It is a colourful journey to Spain and later to Portugal, into the European Capital of Culture.  In the Coast of Death The Spanish coast of Galicia, or the death coast called for the numerous shipwrecks,  was successfully depicted on the big screen. Directed by Lois Patiño, awarded several times, for a perfect visual composition and rhythm this time got it right. Man's constant struggle to survive run through the plot, engaging to get insight into the life on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The characteristics of the film beside the exceptional visual quality is slow paste, which gives it certain charm to it.

The special Friday Art kino Odeon culminated with a retrospective of short experimental avant-garde films by young Austrian director Siegfried A. Fruhauf entitled Raging Vortex.

Today Art kino Odeon will show a documentary of the opposite ends of the independent film sector. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater, directed by Gabe Klinger. Tonight Hassan's Way, a blockbuster by two debut film-makers Fran Araújo and Ernesto de Nova, is an inspiring tale about the courage of an unemployed man. The protagonist Hassan ventures on a long journey, full of  adventures . What the life can be like at the low end of the social ladder. In a unique way, the film critically presents the economic pressures and social prejudice in contemporary Europe.
 

Isola Cinema's Saturday programme presents a collage of three extraordinary short films under the collective title Song Of Some Time by the young Montenegro director Ivan Salatić.

"I wanted to make a film about growing up in the 90s, surrounded by the atmosphere of war - a time the films of today only rarely touch upon," said Ivan Salatić, the young Montenegrin director and the author of the first of the three short films, titledIntro.

The second film, Springtime Suns, was directed by the Serbian director Stefan Ivančić. It is set into the present and it is  autobiographical and even slightly documentary; the director used his own relatives as actors.

Moonless Summer, the third film, also directed by Ivančić, is  personal. Its story is about a 16-year old girl, who is about to go abroad to study.