ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

Sunday started with a sad news: Franci Slak died yesterday. The death doesn't ask if it's suitable, it just strikes and I, stranger in a foreign country, feel a need to write in a foreign language that my heart is full of pain.
Our first closer meeting was on a premiere of Straight Ahead, my first short film, back in 1998. After the screening he came to me and said: "Congratulations, great effort and even bigger achievement". The moment is still very vivid in my memory, the great filmmaker approaching the young one. He told those words in his pathetic style of filmmaker, of true artist, that I rarely met in my life ever again. I really admired him because of that and I'm gratefull that he made my entering in the world of filmmaking something that I will never forget.
In the next years I was meeting him quite often, as we were good friends and colleagues with his stepdaughter Tosa. But in the last few years we got closer. In 2003 he produced The Frontiers of My World, documentary that we shot in Western Sahara. His help in the editing was priceless, he guided us with his enormous knowledge and he never crossed the line trying to impose something that was not part of our vision. There I first met a great pedagogue who had shared his knowledge over the last 20 years with Slovenian students of film directing.
While I'm writing, the memories of summer 2006 are jumping through my mind. In that period I had lived almost two months in his house in Slovenia, while finishing my film paris.love and working as his assistant on his film On Earth as it is in Heaven. Although he was very much affected by his illness (his weight was around 54 kg), I was astonished by his energy, by his will for living. Always in the move, always thinking, imagining new things, new projects. During that time we had spoken quite a lot, about his life, his work. We watched his old movies and he was remembering the interesting things, never really in a sentimental way but rather analytically and with a lot of humour. During those two months he shared with me not just his home but also his emotions, feelings, thoughts... I'm very proud that I shortly followed Franci on his personal and creative path of his life.
Our last meeting was in August 2007, when he came upon my invitation to be a part of the party scene in a documentary about Brina Svit. He was as always, charming and witty, full of new plans. Two months after he proudly wrote to me that he became a grandfather. It sounded as a begining of a new period in Franci's life.
But cancer won one more time. We lost a great humanist, pedagogue and filmmaker. The spirit of filmmaking without him will never be the same. FADE OUT

J.J.B.