Like a child growing up and developing its personality, this Festival develops its character and position through time and circumstances in which it was created. Reality begins with a dream – in the beginning there was a dream about this Festival and gradually this dream became a reality created with creative efforts throughout the year.

There are three key factors that make this young Festival a reality: readiness to take risks, search for perfection and energy of realisation. In this sense, the readiness to take risks means courage to try something completely unconventional. The search for perfection is a wish for the Festival to fit in a destination, national and international context. This project has been an adventure since the very beginning, an exciting and peculiar experience full of physical, financial and psychological risks, the very same way all things are uncertain in today’s world. In literary history, the adventure motive has been present since the beginning, from Homer’s Odyssey. Joseph Campbell in the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces dedicates and considers adventure as a motive and comes to the conclusion that heroic mythological stories, from culture to culture, follow a similar basic pattern, starting from the “call for adventure”, after which follow the dangerous voyage and the eventual success. The adventure’s challenge is that it can take up any form. This is also a way for us to draw out the maximum from our lives. Adventures, especially the ones leading to new waters and territories can also be frightening.

We dedicated a part of our programme to the great Michelangelo Antonioni and we are grateful that we are allowed to use the visual from his film L’avventura for our official poster. The works of Antonioni, like all great authors, are an expression of his soul, or like Ionesco said: “A work of art is above all an adventure of mind.” Since the very beginning of the human kind, fear was the source for these adventures of mind. Then came the word. But images were also present since the beginning. The cave paintings in Altamira or Lascaux are a visual display of human necessity to tell stories and describe its fears and adventures of mind. The Australian Aborigines have a thought about the so called “Dreamtime” in which things from the past and the future co-exist, in films those are flashbacks. When we dream, which is an adventure into our sub consciousness; it is almost always in images. When we wish to interpret those dream, the images become words. Writers, screenwriter and other storytellers of society, authors of fairy tales are direct descendants of those shamans.

We are showing great the adventurers of mind, imagination and picture, adventurers of film like Michelangelo Antonioni and Jacques Tati, but also those of the new era like Michael Haneke, Veit Helmer, Aleksandr Sokurov and many young adventurers in the sections of 1st and 2nd feature, short and student films. You are invited to join the adventure because, like Aristophanes said: “There is nothing better than to achieve a bold adventure- worthy of our trip.”

-Director of the Festival, Sergej Stanojkovski Ma.Art.