Various Approaches, Production Frameworks and Narrative Strategies: Notes on the Competition Films

International Film Festival Art Film, the 31st edition of which took place in Košice from 21-28 June 2025, is now the only film festival in Slovakia to host a FIPRESCI jury; the previous occasion on which a FIPRESCI Jury Prize was awarded in Slovakia was in 2018 at the now-defunct IFF Bratislava. The FIPRESCI Prize returns to Slovakia in a significant year for the Federation of Film Critics, as it marks the 100th anniversary of its foundation.

IFF Art Film’s selection of films for the FIPRESCI jury was wisely designed to ensure inclusion of several outstanding films from the festival’s parallel International and Central and Eastern European competition sections. The eight features competing for the FIPRESCI Jury Prize represented a diverse sample of directorial approaches, genres and forms, artistic concepts and narrative strategies.

Two debut features were characterised by elements of dramedy and an overall heart-warming tone. In DJ Ahmet, writer/director Georgi M. Unkovski depicts the difficult coming-of-age of a young man living in a religiously conservative Muslim community in rural North Macedonia. His mother has died, his father is alone in his grief, and his little brother has not yet begun to talk. Unkovski’s film won three International Competition awards: the Blue Angel for Best Feature Film, Best Director and Best Male Actor. In contrast, co-writer/director Maria Zbąska’s This Is Not My Film depicts a married Polish couple in a different situation. Bored with the comforts of bourgeois cohabitation, they embark on an autumn hike along the Polish coast, sleeping in a tent and purposely exposing themselves to discomfort, risk, and physical constraints in order to realise that they are still bound by love and a sense of partnership. Despite differences of setting, story content and style, both films share a strong feel-good movie dimension, offering unequivocal hope that human endeavour bears fruit and small victories and attainment of personal maturity are possible.

The coming-of-age theme also features in another debut feature, writer/director Saulė Bliuvaitė’s Toxic, set in a poor industrial Lithuanian suburb where a mother, busy with a new relationship, “drops off” her twelve-year-old daughter Marija with the latter’s grandmother for an unspecified period of time. The neglected youngster finds friendship with Kristina, a similarly vulnerable local girl, and the pair look to escape their unstimulating surroundings by taking a fashion modelling course. Despite the latter’s questionable credentials and an overarching lack of adult support more generally, Marija and Kristina form a bond and develop resilience. The film features remarkable cinematography and multi-plane compositions as well as a seemingly undramatised narrative.

In terms of cinematography, Honeymoon, Ukrainian writer/director Zhanna Ozirna’s low-budget debut feature, is fascinating in the truest sense of the word. Set in an unfinished apartment, possibly in Bucha, during the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the film depicts a newlywed couple in the process of moving into their marital home. Except for brief exposition and conclusion scenes, the narrative takes place entirely inside the couple’s small apartment, focusing on their interactions and the disturbing sounds from their immediate surroundings. The war is thus literally out-of-frame yet ever-present in form of sonic hustle and bustle—noises, screams, explosions and gunshots. The minimalist mise-en-scène and limited production conditions make Honeymoon an unobtrusive yet admirable piece of film art.

Norwegian film Team Havnaa, co-written and directed by Bård Breien, is based on the true story of the Havnaa brothers, Magne and Erling, and represents an attempt to enrich the narrative structure of biographical drama. While younger sibling Magne became Norway’s first professional world boxing cruiserweight champion, older one Erling became infamous as one of the perpetrators of a major heist. The film alternates two storylines: the brothers’ young adulthood and shared effort to reach the top of professional boxing and Erling’s longer-term inability to take full emotional responsibility for his adult relationships, including that with now-deceased Magne’s teenage son, who wants to follow his father’s sporting footsteps. Team Havnaa addresses important themes of male emotional fragility in the world of professional sport as well as masculine immaturity more generally.

The FIPRESCI competition films also included three Slovakian productions or co-productions that displayed notable generic, formal and thematic diversity. Co-writer/director Rasťo Boroš’s The Sluggard Clan explored the theme of masculinity in a distinctively Slovak way. Although loosely inspired by Božena Slančíková Timrava’s 1914 Slovak literary classic Ťapákovci, the film’s poetics are more akin to the magical realism of Gabriel García Márquez’s writings. Boroš also draws on Slovak film and television classics for his imagery, especially the work of Juraj Jakubisko. However, The Sluggard Clan‘s seemingly eclectic aestheticis united by themes of family trauma and, above all, loyalty (often misguided) to deceased ancestors and ancestral belief systems. Thus, Boroš creates a balladic hyperbole of Timrava’s literary source material, enriching it with both references to works of world cinema, and the confusion of conspiratorial views and geopolitical groupings that characterise today’s polarised Slovak society.

Elsewhere, Martin Kollar’s visual poem Chronicle offers a disturbing picture of contemporary Slovakia. The film’s associative sequence of still-life images depicts a sad, culturally barren country in an era of epidemics and pandemics (be it COVID-19 or Foot and mouth disease)—a country in an era of loneliness and enforced separation. Kollar’s eye for detail, metaphor and micronarrative within long, slow and meditative shots, as seen in his previous poetic documentary 5 October (2016), brings Chronicle to its most depressing and poignant form. However, even at this time and contemporary subject matter, Kollar does not lose sight of hope and the ubiquity of life, which always emerges from beneath seemingly dead surfaces in the end.

The last film in IFF Art Film’s inaugural FIPRESCI competition, and the winner of its Jury Prize, was Perla, written and directed by Austrian-Slovak filmmaker Alexandra Makarová. Makarova successfully creates a simple, yet rich and ambiguous, portrait of a woman: a mother and artist who fled to the freer side of the Iron Curtain in the early 1970s, yet who by the early 1980s still carries the raw memories and emotions surrounding her traumatic escape and separation from her daughter’s father. Perla teases, surprises and reframes its audience’s impression multiple times during the course of its narrative.

IFF Art Film prepared a cinematic abundance for the FIPRESCI jury this year— the works judged include several extraordinary films that deserve wide distribution in Slovak cinemas.

Mária Ridzoňová Ferenčuhová
Edited by Jonathan Murray
©FIPRESCI 2025