Slovenian producer Danijel Hočevar is one of the busiest producers at this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival.
Through his company Vertigo Films, which he runs with the young producers Katja Lenarčič and Zala Opara, he has six films across the festival and two projects in the CineLink coproduction market.
Three of these are majority Slovenian co-productions: Urša Menart’s Everything That’s Wrong With You is a world premiere in the Feature competition; Metod Pevec’s When I Get Out in the documentary competition, while Miha Hočevar’s Hidden People, a rare co-production with Iceland, is screening in Open Air Premieres.
As a minority co-producer, Hočevar has Visar Morina’s Sundance title Shame And Money and Dina Duma’s Tribeca prize-winner Skateboarding Is Not For Girls in the feature competition, while Maja Miloš’s No Fairy Dust is a world premiere in the Midnight Screenings programme.
This last title, a transgressive, sexual awakening story much like the director’s debut Clip, is a co-production with Hočevar’s long-time partners: Serbia’s Baš Čelik and Croatia’s Propeler Film, as well as Slovenia’s SPOK Films.
The film went through CineLink Works in Progress in 2023.
In this year’s Works in Progress section, Baš Čelik, Vertigo and Propeler Film are presenting Bojan Vuletić’s The White Week, a drama thriller about a young boy who lies about his brother’s death, triggering paranoia and fear of foreigners in his small community.
Vertigo’s Katja Lenarčič is also co-producing Koryo, the first fiction film by Serbian documentary filmmaker Mladen Kovačević, which is in the CineLink Co-production Market.
Although funding in Slovenia is higher than in neighbouring countries such as Croatia, and much higher than in Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Kosovo, the relatively small size of the region’s film industries has meant Vertigo has thrived by working as a nimble international coproducer.
“National funding is insufficient for the quality and type of films we want to make, with budgets between €1m and €2m,” says Hočevar. “The only way to do it is to have partners you trust and who share your taste and your vision on what a film should be.”
Hočevar’s regular partners also include Bosnia’s SCCA/pro.ba, with which he has partnered on films including Danis Tanović’s 2013 Berlinale double prize-winner An Episode In The Life Of An Iron Picker, and the Mitevska sisters from North Macedonia, producer Labina and director Teona, with whom he has collaborated on films including God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunia, Damjan Kozole’s urban drama Nightlife and family drama Half-Sister.
Although Hočevar has produced films that have been selected for all of the top festivals but says there is a tendency to pigeonhole films from the region.
“There is only a certain type of film from Southeast Europe that international programmers expect to see,” he suggests. “It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Both Shame And Money, which is set in Kosovo and depicts a different social system and set of values, and Skateboarding Is Not For Girls, a coming-of-age drama about a teenage Roma girl in North Macedonia who challenges social expectations and gender stereotypes, are examples of this kind of film.
“But other stories that we want to tell, which are set within a frame of a wider European culture and more universal issues, like Everything That’s Wrong With You, which is about friendship and alienation in modern society, or When I Get Out, a documentary about prisoners who are looking for an emotional way out, are increasingly hard to place in big festivals.”
Hočevar has also produced local hits in Slovenia, such as Miha Hočevar’s Going Our Own Way and its sequel, with the third instalment currently in financing, and Hidden People is another audience-oriented title.
He is now working on two films by Kozole: corruption drama 20 Meters, a co-production with Croatia, Serbia and Greece, is in post, while Unconscious Mind, a fascism-related drama based on a real event connecting Sigmund Freud and Slovenian speleologist cave expert Gregor Žiberna, is in development.
Hočevar is expanding north and south, too, with Andrina Mračnikar’s WW11 drama Mila Marija, a co-production with Austria, Greece and Slovakia, about a young partisan from the Slovenian ethnic minority in Austria nearing completion. Also in the final stages is Katarina Morano’s debut feature, Seaview, a co-production with partners from Greece and Croatia. The social drama unfolds over a chaotic 24 hours in the life of its female protagonist and her young family.
New projects by Menart and Metod Pevec are in development and financing, as is New Rabbitland by Serbia’s Ana Nedeljković and Nikola Majdak, a majority production led by Baš Čelik. The latter is an animated feature set in the world built in short films by the two filmmakers, Rabbitland, which won the 2013 Berlinale Crystal Bear, and Money And Happiness, which screened at Annecy in 2023.
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