About Festival

The international festival Days of Ethnographic Film (DEF) is a joint venture of Slovene Ethnological Society and Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

The festival has not competitive nature; it has a section of student films and a section of other films. For regular program selectors choose approximately 30 films.

During the festival Slovene Ethnological Society is giving Niko Kuret’s awards for the merits in the development of ethnographic film in Slovenia. So far the laureates were: Allison Jablonko, Asen Balikci, Andrej O. Župančič, Boris Kuhar, Herta Maurer Lausegger and Naško Križnar.

Days of Ethnographic Film is the member of CAFFE (Coordinating anthropological film festivals of Europe).

From 2015, the festival is biennial, and during in-between years we are organizing film seminars.

Our goals

DEF is dedicated to the ethnographic films, which are made by anthropologists and ethnologists, but also by documentary filmmakers. Ethnographic film flourished in the scientific field of anthropology and ethnology, where realistic property of film medium was enthusiastically accepted and later gradually formalized in special methods and approaches. Some of this legacy was simultaneously or interchangeably developed by documentary filmmakers, who believed in similar aesthetics ideals and had the same ethic principles, for instance authors who used observational, cinéma vérité or direct cinema styles.

The production of ethnographic and documentary films in the world is huge. But many films can’t reach to the public, because their style is not suitable for regular distributions like cinema and public TV. Our wish and commitment is that we build meeting point for audience and authors, who would like to see or show these films.