On January 26th the Slovenian Film Centre (SFC) held a press conference in Ljubljana to announce the results of its activities in 2022 and its projects for 2023.
Following the 2022 call for applications, the SFC financed seven fiction features, including Marko Naberšnik’s Whites Wash at Ninety, Damjan Kozole’s 20 Metres and FC Freedom by Boris Petkovič. A total of €3,745,000 was shared out between the 7 films. Two documentary projects received a total of €270,000: Ema Kugler’s Once Upon a Time in the Soča Valley and Damjan Kozole’s OHO. And in the shorts category €150,000 was divided between three fiction films while four animation films shared €123,700.
In 2022 Slovenia hosted several foreign productions, which together spent more than €11 million in the country. Benefiting from the refund mechanism now in place, these productions obtained a total of €2.8 million in rebates.
According to the SFC, 2022 was also a good year for cinemas, with 1.76 million spectators – an increase of 150% compared to last year when the attendance figure was 710,000. As a result of this encouraging success, Nataša Bučar, SFC’s Director, said that for 2023 “the SFC will have significantly increased funding for national film production.” So the SFC plans to invest €8.8 euros compared to 6.7 million in 2022.
For the current year there are 11 features scheduled to be made in Slovenia. The press release also says that the “SFC and its partners will continue to work on already established projects, such as retrospectives of Slovenian films abroad, Our Films at Home, Slovenian Film Premiere, etc.”
Sources: SFC, Cineuropa, Screen Daily
