A real pearl! A powerful and poetic one-take short of a real event happening on the Slovenian border. The film has won the Human Rights Award at Sarajevo Film Festival 2016 and the main award as the best short Slovenian film.

Synopsis

24 October, 2015. A nice day in autumn in a nice landscape. A crowd of refugees and migrants accompanied by soldiers and police officers make their way from the Schengen border between Slovenia and Croatia towards the refugee camp in Brezice. Suddenly, the landscape starts to appear less nice than it was. In 2002, the distinguished Slovenian filmmaker Damjan Kozole shot a feature film on the exact same border about two traffickers smuggling people into the EU. This time, reality replaced fiction. He decided to take a ‘no directing’ approach by using static camera, like an eerie remake of Lumiere’s The Arrival of a Train.

Director’s statement

When the wave of refugees reached Hungary, it was only a matter of time before these people would spill over into Slovenia. I knew – as a director and as a person – that I had to react to these tragic events. I was dumbfounded and I didn’t know how to document their journey. We put up the camera and waited for seven hours. After that, everything happened on its own. We got about four hours of film in the can. I felt that was enough.

Festivals & Awards (selection)

Sarajevo Film Festival 2016 – Human Rights Special Mention | DokuDoc, Slovenia 2016 – Jury Prize for the Best Film | Slovenian Film Festival 2016 – Vesna Award for the Best Documentary Film | Vilnius International Film Festival, Lithuania 2017 | Go Short – Nijmegen International Short Film Festival, Netherlands 2017