On the third day of FEST, the directors of the films ‘Wake Me’ (Zbudi me) and ‘The Fox’ (Der Fuchs), which the festival audience can see in the Main Competition Programme, presented themselves to the journalists.
Director Marko Šantić, cinematographer Ivan Zadro and producers Dimče Stojanovski and Jure Bušić presented the film ‘Wake Me’. According to Marko Šantić, the director and co-writer of the film, the story of the migrant crisis that hit Europe a few years ago was told through the main character's amnesia. He stated that the inspiration for the film had been the wave of migrants from the Middle East that had passed through Europe and Slovenia during 2014 and 2015.
‘The reaction of average people to the arrival of a foreign culture was interesting. You could see how people were getting scared. You could feel fear and a kind of paranoia. The way of thinking was changing’, said Šantić to the journalists.
As he says, he took the main character's amnesia element as a symbol for ‘redesigning history on a larger scale’.
‘We are witnessing the redesigned history that has been taking place in recent years around us, the younger generations do not know much about the common history, they read less and watch the internet more and have a narrowed circle of information, and we have also noticed a collective social amnesia’, he explained.
Young actors Simon Morzé and Marko Kerezović presented the German-Austrian film ‘The Fox’ directed by Adrian Goiginger. As heard in the FEST press hall, the film is the true story of Franz Streitberger, the great-grandfather of director and screenwriter Adrian Goiginger, and is a story about the friendship between a young man and a fox.
‘Our director's great-grandfather, Franz Streitberger, told that story with the fox when Adrian was 14 years old. The fate of his great-grandfather was very difficult, because due to the poverty of his parents, he was also the one who was sold. Adrian told how Franz did not show any emotions about that difficult life of his. He became cold to the extent that he did not let others feel how he felt. The only time he showed emotions and shed tears was when he was talking about the fox’, Morzé said.
He pointed out that the film had been shot with a real fox and that during the filming six animals had been trained to cooperate with the actors, which had been an unusual experience.
In addition to Morzé, the young artist Marko Kerezović also spoke about the film ‘The Fox’, who emphasized that this was his first film and that he had got the role by applying for the casting.
‘This is, I hope, the beginning of my career, because I intend to pursue acting. I enrolled in acting studies in September in Vienna, therefore, I hope to continue making films’, said Kerezović and added that they had chosen him at the open casting out of 900 actors.
