6th FESTIVAL V-F-X LJUBLJANA 

The sixth edition of V-F-X Ljubljana, a festival traditionally devoted to experimental film and video practices, confidently continues on the path carefully set over the first five years. The festival will take place at four venues: the main programme will unfold at the Slovenian Cinematheque, the audiovisual performances will fully come to life on the stage of the Katedrala Hall at Kino Šiška, while part of the programme will be on view at Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art Ljubljana. In cooperation with its tactics&practice programme, this time curated by  Marco De Mutiis under the title Becoming Image, we will traditionally open a space for a critical exploration of various digital images at the intersection of computer, internet and film cultures. A new addition this year is the fourth festival venue, +MSUM (Museum of Contemporary Art  Metelkova), where the traditional festival’s VR Point will be on display in the museum’s premises. This year, VR Point offers the award-winning immersive experience of the history of British rave culture In Pursuit of  Repetitive Beats (2023) by Darren Emerson. 

The festival will formally open at Kino Šiška, where, in cooperation with the Level Up concert series, we will welcome NÂR, a Lebanese multi-instrumentalist, singer and composer with collaborators, Lebanese photographer Nader Bahsoun and French filmmaker Loïc Verdillon, and  Radio Hito, a Brussels-based, Italian-Vietnamese musician. In her cinema concert, featuring a 16mm film projection, NÂR will provide a dreamlike walking tour through the streets of Beirut and Southern Lebanon.  Radio Hito, who dissolves the boundaries between the classical Lied tradition, contemporary chanson and ambient electronics, will present the principle of musical economy with her Casio keyboard. We will move to Kino Šiška’s Katedrala Hall also on the penultimate evening of the festival, when the music and visual performance Propulsor – Score for the Ship Galeb will take place, inspired by the history of Galeb, a “ship of peace and friendship” that sailed out into the world in a utopian spirit during the time of the Yugoslav Non-Aligned Movement. 

The main part of the festival will take place at the Slovenian Cinematheque, where the programme will be anchored in the exploration of British experimental film. We will host John Smith, one of the most emblematic filmmakers of the post-war British avant-garde,  whose constant search for a new film language originated in a structural-materialist approach to film and who became one of the wittiest portrayers of everyday banality. Another guest will be the award-winning artist filmmaker Miranda Pennell, who employs various critical archival practices to explore forms of collective creation. Recently, she has been focusing especially on examining and questioning archives and images of the colonial imaginary. John Smith and Miranda  Pennell will each be presented with two short film programmes. 

We will be visited by members of the film and sound collective Bristol  Experimental and Expanded Film (BEEF), who will bring three different programmes. The first will present select titles from the history of  20th-century British experimental film, in which the London Film-Maker’s Co-Op provided an important creative junction. The second programme, titled Grain and Grit and devoted to contemporary currents, will present more recent films by members of the collective. They are characterised by a creative reflection on the materiality, texture and grain of handmade analogue small-gauge film methods. The third programme – the closing event of the festival – will bring two expanded film performances: through sound and visuality, Melanie Crawford explores the tense perception of stillness and flicker, while, in her two-channel  16mm expanded cinema performance with a live improvised score, Mars  Saude explores the questions of vision technologies, violence and victimhood. 

One of the filmmakers in focus, who will also be with us in person, is the Japanese animator Shunsaku Hayashi, who is considered one of the more peculiar contemporary filmmakers in the already peculiar field of animated and experimental auteur film. Hayashi also uses analogue techniques in bringing his painting canvases to life, for he is primarily a  painter who insists on hand-painting every individual frame.  

This year’s edition of the festival will again present some carefully selected pieces of the Slovenian history of experimental film with the premiere of eight freshly digitised films by OM production, made at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. This fictitious artistic entity with countless alter egos is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year and is still considered one of the most intriguing phenomena within the Slovenian and Yugoslav avant-garde film scene.  

One of the festival constants is the section Vistas, whose two programmes feature the highlights of world experimental cinema of the last two years, according to the festival team. Like in previous years, we invited curators of important European film archives and film festivals to co-curate the third Vistas programme, which, for this edition, has been renamed Canon due to the predominance of the monuments of the history of world avant-garde. Another key constant of the festival is the programme of Slovenian student films What’s Cooking?, which will include not only the exquisite works by students of the art academies in Ljubljana (UL AGRFT, UL ALUO, AVA) and Nova Gorica (AU UNG) but also those by students of the Visual Arts and Design Programme at the  Faculty of Education, University of Primorska in Koper (PE PEF). 

Upon the opening of the festival, the exhibition From Shot to Sequence, on view in the café of the Slovenian Cinematheque, will present the results of the traditional pre-festival analogue film workshop led by artist Neža Knez, whose participants again discovered the creative pleasure of filming with a Bolex camera and experimental processing of  16mm film. The workshop films will also be screened as festival trailers before the festival programmes in the Silvan Furlan Hall.  

We dedicate this year's edition of V-F-X Ljubljana to the recently deceased friend and artist Marko A. Kovačič, one of the key figures in Ljubljana’s alternative scene, who engaged in the fields of video, performance art, installations and ambiences. Through his works, he constantly reflected on scientific discoveries and social changes; for him, fictional work was practically the only way to face reality, be it political, existential or personal. That is why this year, the festival’s programming team decided to include Marko’s video performance American Dream (1986) in Canon,  the Vistas programme curated by guest curators. Through a game of hide-and-seek, the work deconstructs the dream of the promised land and foreshadows the major transition of the social system toward liberal capitalism. A fitting film for a time when it seems that the social order is once again on the verge of major changes. 

The Festival team