At the 11th Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož, which has just concluded, the film Landscape No. 2 received as many as six main Vesna Awards, given by the expert jury of the festival:
The Festival of Slovenian Film is an overview of last year's production,
which concludes with the Awards for the most prominent achievements and artists.
This festival is the successor of the Week of the National Film, established
in the 1970s.
The Slovenian premiere of the film is going to take place on 22 October at the 11th Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož.
It is to be shown in the Slovenian cinemas since 23 October. The Slovenian distributor is Cinemania Group.
The Giornate degli Autori / Venice Days section, where the film Landscape No. 2 was screened, was chosen as the best section of the 65th Venice Film Festival. The Bisato d’Oro Award 2008 is given by the jury of film critics, this time presided over by the film critic and historian Antonio Llorens Sanchis.
The Polish premiere of Landscape No. 2 will take place in the competition section of the 24th Warsaw Film Festival, where the film will be screened on 12 October (18:30), 16 October (11:00) and 17 October (21:00).
After the conclusion of the 65th Venice Festival, selected films were presented to the audiences in Rome and Milan in the context of the "Venice in Rome" and "Venice in Milan" (Panoramica) programmes. Landscape No. 2 also qualified for this selection; the audience in Rome will be able to see it on 11 and 12 September in Cinema Farnese.
A killer repping an ugly, unresolved and nearly forgotten chapter of post-WWII history confronts a cynical, amoral Everyman in "Landscape No. 2," the sophomore feature from Slovenian helmer-scribe Vinko Möderndorfer. Played realistically yet with a wink to Grand Guignol theatrics, this audacious, superbly crafted, contempo horror pic spiced with humorous hardcore action could surpass the notoriety of his feature debut "Suburbs". …Perfs are tops across the board, supported by a tidy tech package led by the ironic lensing of ace Serbian d.p. Dušan Joksimović.
Perhaps in the Giornate degli autori (Authors' Days) programme we found an excellent Slovenian response to the film No Country for Old Men. There are many common points between the Academy Award‑winning Coen brothers' masterpiece and Landscape No. 2 by Vinko Möderndorfer…Once again the Giornate degli autori section proves that today it is senseless to differentiate between the authorial and genre film. Everything is a genre, but everything can still become authorial. A very beautiful film. If only we also had such films in the competition programme.
…Vinko Möderndorfer shot a political film in the form of a thriller, where violence from the past erupts in the present: and it is no coincidence that when asked about models, he mentions The Shining by Stanley Kubrick, where a hotel caretaker is "forced" to repeat murders he had committed in his previous lives.
Through "film noir", which does not avoid surprises with a hint of "splatter" and anthological erotic scenes (you will not easily forget Barbara Cerar and Maja Martina Merljak), the film becomes a metaphor for history, which has been repeating in the former Yugoslavia for a long time in the form of tragedy and grotesque.
Möderndorfer develops the text as an essay on political film and lines up archive shots and television programmes about the uncovering of the fragments of historical horrors, the ambiguous power of the church, a grotesque portrayal of communism reduced to an image of an old man with a catheter, and a clash between the victims and murderers in a "landscape" of the living dead.
The world premiere of the film Landscape No.2 will take place at the 65th Venice International Film Festival in the Giornate degli Autori / Venice Days programme.
Press screening:
World premiere:
Repeat screenings:
Screenings at the Cannes Marché du Film:
Forum Ljubljana signed an agreement on the worldwide sales of the film with the French sales agent WIDE Management from Paris.
Screenings at the Berlinale European Film Market: