— photo: Hitchhiker Cinema —
18 — 19
interview
— text: Matúš Kvasnička
When the Intentions Are Clear, It Gets Reflected in the Result Characterizing Lines as “a poem about the reality of modern city life” might seem vague, but it perfectly describes this film by the director Barbora Sliepková. Her urban symphony embodied in a film won the main award for the most notable international documentary at last year’s Ji.hlava IDFF, as well as two more awards for the best debut film and the best sound design.
Lines is your feature debut. What did you feel when you found out it won at the Ji.hlava Festival? They called me at night to tell me we won, and my heart skipped three beats, one for each award. When we were driving to Jihlava, I was very nervous about the audience's reaction. After the screening, I was relieved everything had gone well. It is a great honor for me to have won these awards. It is hard for me to describe as I have been going to the festival as a visitor ever since I found my passion for film. As we were receiving the awards, I had flashbacks to all that I had experienced there, Viktor Kossakovsky's masterclass, being at the screening of the director Laila Pakalniņa's film The Chimney and lying there in a crowded screening room under the screen with my classmates, everyone in awe… I felt both a great sense of satisfaction and responsibility in face of the thought that I might make another film. Will you?
I took a considerably long break before the premiere of Lines. I was stuck and waiting for “it” to happen. The film was completed, but without a premiere, the process felt incomplete. Now that it happened, my motivation to work has returned, and I started working on multiple projects. One of them is about dreams. Dreams intrigue me. When I sleep, I always dream about something. I have been reading a lot about the topic and have recently been to a seminar on dream interpretation in psychotherapy led by the psychiatrist Jozef Hašto. Now,
I am looking for a key to transform it all into a film. If everything works out, the first project on this topic is going to be a radio feature. I like the idea of only using the audio format, without any visual input, to cover the topic of dreams. I might find the right way of visual interpretation later. Besides that, I have been approached by Lucia Kašová to cooperate with her and Viera Čákanyová on filming one of the three shorts for a project whose working title is Ecological Disasters. It talks about the three most dangerous toxic waste dumps in Slovakia. We each have “our own” dump and rather than reports, we want to make essays on ecology. Have you visited the dump you were assigned? I will cover the dump in Predajná (translator's note: a village in central Slovakia) that the mayor calls ‘black eyes’. These are two acid tar lagoons. Acid tar is a byproduct of oil processing. It is a horrible place, yet it has a kind of strange allure to it. It sits on a hill among birch trees with woods and beautiful nature all around. The lagoons themselves are also beautiful until you smell them. They are calm with only small ripples running on the surface. Every now and then, something bubbles up as the lagoons’ content continues seeping through. They are filled with garbage. Who knows what people throw in there… I even saw a farm animal thrown inside with only legs sticking out. It is a brutal place. The first idea shaped out to be something Stalker-like, so we will see what it ultimately becomes.