Dear ethnographic film lovers, viewers and authors alike,
This year we have organised the eighth edition of our festival The Days of Ethnographic Film, which has navigated between relative constancy and some novelties since its inception in 2007.
What is constant? All these years, the three organisers have remained the same: the Slovene Ethnological Society as its lead organiser, the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology at the Research Centre of Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, to which the films are submitted and where they are kept, and the Slovene Ethnographic Museum, where they are screened. Similarly constant is the festival’s basic principle: the selection committee favours ethnographic films with a research contribution by visual anthropologists, but is at the same time open to quality research documentaries, experimental films, and new approaches. The selection of the films is always a matter of negotiation, when the committee has two or three members or when, like this year, the selection has been entrusted to Naško Križnar; he, too, had to weigh and make compromises, as he writes in Selection and Anti-Selection. Since the Institute of Slovenian Ethnology enabled the submission of films by way of the Internet, the number of films has doubled from 99 in 2013 to 189 last year, and 198 this year.
A constant/inconstant feature of the festival is the Niko Kuret Award that is bestowed for contributions to the development of Slovene visual anthropology. This year it is again awarded and will be handed over on Monday. We are grateful to the Ministry of Culture for constant funding of the international festival, and also to the Slovenian National Commission for UNESCO that supported presence of some authors.
What is new? The festival’s refurbished website www.def.si provides access to the data on submitted films and the films selected for the Main Programme, Student Films, and Informative Section. The working group for ethnographic film has decided that our international festival will hence be biennial and held in odd years; in even years, The Days of Ethnographic Film will be dedicated to a retrospective of either fundamental ethnographic films, national productions, or focused on typical authors or schools of visual anthropology that are milestones in the development of the discipline.
We will certainly continue to put a strong emphasis on the presence of the authors, so that the second week of March in Ljubljana truly provides the space/time/option for an exchange of research experiences and views on the visual. The Days of Ethnographic Film offer an excellent learning environment where the visual is verbalised and, as we hope, films and reflections later lead to new films and inspire new methodological approaches. We welcome the authors and the viewers, who do make the festival alive; therefore, to all ethnographic film lovers, let us get the eight festival moving!
Nadja Valentinčič Furlan