Monday 18 February 2008

Lady Svit Dances in Buenos Aires

The editing of documentary portrait of French-Slovenian writter Brina Svit is coming to the end. Here is an extract from the film. Location: parc in Buenos Aires. Still not color corrected and sound edited.
Brina and Sergio. And Tango. Beautiful.


J.J.B.

Sunday 10 February 2008

Straight Ahead

You never forget the first one. This is Slovenian (or maybe from some other countries also?) saying and it refers to one's first relationship. Well, in this case is a bit different.
I started my filmmaking career on local TV, doing everything: being journalist, shooting, editing... And during and after that time I shot several short films on video, being also awarded for some of them on festivals of amateur film. Straight Ahead was my first real film, shot on 16 mm with a crew and actors and everything else.
So, Matjaz Javsnik and Drago Milinovic as main characters. DOP was Jure Cernec, sound Urska Kos, editing Varja Mocnik, sound mix Hanna Preuss and Borut Berden, make up Klaudia Kolaric, I wrote it, directed and produced it.
The screenplay was wrote upon a comic story from Darko Perovic and Enrique Sanchez Abuli.
The film got two international awards and I traveled quite a lot around with it.


Trivia:
- This was a first film appearance of Matjaz Javsnik. Today, he is quite big star in Slovenia
- Femme fatale in the film is Vesna Milek. Today, she is famous Slovenian writter and journalist
- Just before we shot the scene where the kids throw the water bombs on Matjaz and Drago, Natasa Bertalanic (a.d.) and I stoped in the shop to buy preservatives needed for that scene. I demanded 30 preservatives and Natasa, with an innocent smile, explained to the lady that we are shooting the film:)
- during a year after releasing the film we traveled around Slovenia with a 16mm projector doing the inside and outside screenings. That was acctually inspiration for my story in Desperado Tonic.

J.J.B.

Balkan Gypsy Evening

Yesterday I went with Khaled to a concert of Taraf de Haidouks, the Romanian Gypsy band.The concert was at Elysees-Montmartre, just two steps from my place.

They play traditional Romanian music and they are really exceptional musicians. Apart from "the wedding and funeral" songs they also played some music from classical composers. I recognised the piece from Bartok (you can see and hear it here) and Khaled recognised Khachaturian's one.
Anyhow, the concert was great and since it was quite early, we went after for a dinner. Being in the Balkan Gypsy mood, we ordered a kilo of meat, we ate it in half hour and we didn't look like French people at all.

J.J.B.