On the 21st of February, at the "Nagore" Café Bar in Strumica, the Tiberiopolian Film Evening was held, titled "Auteur Film - From Narrative to Visualization", which featured a special screening of two exceptional authored films that were part of the "Asterfest" program: "The Art of Prayer" by Stefan Shashkov and "With Raised Hands" by Mitko Panov.
First, actress Tankica Stojanova read fragments from Goce Ristovski's speech "Everyone Will Make Films", which reflects on the future of film without neglecting contemporary technical and technological possibilities, which through the path from innovation to projection bring film imagination to surprising results, something that transformed into a cult presentation of "old stars" in the twenty-first century.
"The Art of Prayer" is a multiple award-winning Macedonian film, shot on several continents, which manages to touchingly capture the art of prayer by showing the beauty of meditative silence. Its author Stefan Shashkov is a long-time participant and collaborator of "Asterfest". Shashkov's films "The Art of Prayer" (2004), "Colors in Time" (2005, a film about Milosh Kodzhoman) and "Shri Charshi" (2012, co-authored with Aco Stankoski) were successfully shown at "Asterfest", and in 2014 he was also a jury member. During his address in Strumica, he said that with the films selected for that evening, they would try to draw attention to the authorial process itself, which is actually a prerequisite for building the author's film poetics. Speaking about the experience with his 22-minute film "The Art of Prayer", as well as the image-story relationship, Shashkov emphasized that in it he promoted the idea of a universal analogy, which underlies the entire spiritual tradition, and the very idea of making the film originated from India, where he had personally stayed and from where the multi-year journey of creating that film work began.
Immediately after, through a video address, author Mitko Panov thanked Goran Trenchovski as the organizer of "Asterfest", a festival primarily of authored film, which this year celebrates its 20th birthday. Panov, who was also a welcome guest at the previous edition of "Asterfest", said that at the beginning of his stories, the image is most often found and the action emerges precisely from it. According to him, this complex creative, transformative process cannot be fully described, because at the center of every creation lies the unknown, the mysterious, and that which is not amenable to description. The task of the author-director is not only to visualize the story but to give us enough space for our own creation, imagination, or interpretation of it. Panov also drew on personal experience and fascination with stylistic figures - a classification familiar to us from literature, primarily from poetry. His anthology 6-minute film "With Raised Hands" (1985), in Polish production, winner of the "Golden Palm" in Cannes, is a fictional recreation of a true event from the moments before and after shooting the famous photograph showing a woman and child with raised hands.
This film meeting was part of the event cycle in the jubilee season of "Asterfest", and further international promotional activities dedicated to authors and works, as well as the retrospective "Best of Asterfest", are to follow.
First, actress Tankica Stojanova read fragments from Goce Ristovski's speech "Everyone Will Make Films", which reflects on the future of film without neglecting contemporary technical and technological possibilities, which through the path from innovation to projection bring film imagination to surprising results, something that transformed into a cult presentation of "old stars" in the twenty-first century.
"The Art of Prayer" is a multiple award-winning Macedonian film, shot on several continents, which manages to touchingly capture the art of prayer by showing the beauty of meditative silence. Its author Stefan Shashkov is a long-time participant and collaborator of "Asterfest". Shashkov's films "The Art of Prayer" (2004), "Colors in Time" (2005, a film about Milosh Kodzhoman) and "Shri Charshi" (2012, co-authored with Aco Stankoski) were successfully shown at "Asterfest", and in 2014 he was also a jury member. During his address in Strumica, he said that with the films selected for that evening, they would try to draw attention to the authorial process itself, which is actually a prerequisite for building the author's film poetics. Speaking about the experience with his 22-minute film "The Art of Prayer", as well as the image-story relationship, Shashkov emphasized that in it he promoted the idea of a universal analogy, which underlies the entire spiritual tradition, and the very idea of making the film originated from India, where he had personally stayed and from where the multi-year journey of creating that film work began.
Immediately after, through a video address, author Mitko Panov thanked Goran Trenchovski as the organizer of "Asterfest", a festival primarily of authored film, which this year celebrates its 20th birthday. Panov, who was also a welcome guest at the previous edition of "Asterfest", said that at the beginning of his stories, the image is most often found and the action emerges precisely from it. According to him, this complex creative, transformative process cannot be fully described, because at the center of every creation lies the unknown, the mysterious, and that which is not amenable to description. The task of the author-director is not only to visualize the story but to give us enough space for our own creation, imagination, or interpretation of it. Panov also drew on personal experience and fascination with stylistic figures - a classification familiar to us from literature, primarily from poetry. His anthology 6-minute film "With Raised Hands" (1985), in Polish production, winner of the "Golden Palm" in Cannes, is a fictional recreation of a true event from the moments before and after shooting the famous photograph showing a woman and child with raised hands.
This film meeting was part of the event cycle in the jubilee season of "Asterfest", and further international promotional activities dedicated to authors and works, as well as the retrospective "Best of Asterfest", are to follow.