The English version of Film.sk is published to coincide with the start of the Berlin International Film Festival and last year at this time we already knew something surprising – the Slovak-Czech film My Dog Killer (Môj pes Killer) by director Mira Fornay won the Hivos Tiger Award at Rotterdam. This year did not start so spectacularly for Slovak cinema, but the list of planned premieres shows that it is not in any way the beginning of the end.

Moreover, there is some good news coming out of the Berlin Film Festival – the Slovak co-production film Velvet Terrorists (Zamatoví teroristi) was chosen for inclusion in the Forum Section. A majority Slovak project was last presented at the Berlinale in 2011 – it was The House (Dom) by Zuzana Liová; it also was presented in the Forum Section. However, the situation for Slovak participation in the main competition is not so good. The last film to be presented there was When the Stars Were Red (Keď hviezdy boli červené) by director Dušan Trančík, and that was back in 1991. Two years before that, Slovak filmmaker Dušan Hanák won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the Berlin IFF for I Love, You Love (Ja milujem, ty miluješ, 1980) which had been completed for years but “could not speak” – however, that is the tale of our country (with a “velvet” finale).

You can read about the context of the Velvet Terrorists on the following pages. It was released in cinemas in autumn last year and, as ensues from the articles in this magazine, the year 2013 was of interest with regard to Slovak cinema. For the Slovak Film Institute it meant (among other things) the 50th anniversary of its existence and that is one of the reasons why we are writing about this institution. You will find information about the numerous and close relations of the SFI with Slovak filmmaking in the final part of Film.sk – the magazine where we (again) have tried to shed a little light on the cinematography that might surprise us…

Daniel Bernát (Editor-in-Chief)