DEF is a festival without awards for several reasons: among others, because its organisers feel that awards may inadvertently create an unproductive hierarchy in a festival whose essential mission is to explore diverse visual ethnographic approaches. This diversity has become increasingly prominent in recent years, and is hard to assimilate and structure. As advocates of visual ethnography we wish, on the one hand, for as clear as possible and durable methodological approaches; on the other hand, however, we are aware that there can be no progress without going beyond the present methodologies. In the selection of the programme I have aimed for balance between these two tendencies. As an example of a more or less durable approach, I selected films with a participant observation approach in which the protagonists have the final say – with the author remaining in the background – and where the visual narration makes a narrative (mental) point close to the relevant anthropological theme. I then allowed for this approach to be complemented with other filmmaking approaches, provided that the basic visual material was not excessively fragmented in order to meet the filmmaker’s mental scheme, and that some options for interpreting the film’s meaning were left to the viewer. Using these criteria, 70 films were selected from a total of 198 submissions. This was followed by difficult and, to be honest, often subjective and random (read: practical) decisions on the narrow selection. DEF has never been able to present more than 30-35 films in four days. In recent years, the duration of the films has persistently increased, to the embarrassment of organisers of festivals, who wish to reserve some time for a dialogue between the viewers and filmmakers in between individual films. Although the time schedule is not the responsibility of the festival selector, close cooperation with the organisers is recommended, if not urgently required, in this phase of the selection.

There is another thing all festival selectors should acknowledge and that is that the most subtle criteria for selection are created by the pool of submissions. The selector’s basic guideline is useful for the wider selection, and the film discourses of quality films gradually establish the criteria for what belongs in the final festival programme, and what does not. This is how the festival’s external appearance or its strategy is shaped. I wish to thank all the filmmakers whose submissions helped to create the selection criteria and manifest them in the festival programme. If not all signals from the films have been noticed, the only one to blame is the selector. I sincerely hope not to have missed many this year.

Selector of 2015. festival, Naško Križnar