The topic of the Summer Film Festival 4 Elements in August will be NUMBERS

The 21^st edition of the Summer Film Festival 4 Elements will take place in Banská Štiavnica during August 7 – 11, 2019 and its topic will be NUMBERS. The festival will offer a thematic selection of films and several accompanying events at cinemas, cafés but also under the starry sky – at the unique amphitheater overlooking the city.

The program will bring together feature, documentary, animated and experimental films of worldwide production under the central topic. From among the legendary films can be mentioned, for example, the Polish movie The Double Life of Veronique (Krzysztof Kieślowski, 1991) or the French comedy veiled in a dreamy haze Zero for Conduct (Jean Vigo, 1933). Several of the featured films have recently aroused interest at international festivals – for example the Bulgarian-German film 3/4 (Ilian Metev, 2017) or the Japanese-Hongkongese experiment Memento Stella (Takaši Makino, 2018), a fragment of which was created in Banská Štiavnica. A part of the program of this year’s 4 Elements will be several Slovak pre-premiers. They include the documentary The Sound Is Innocent (Johana Ožvold, 2019), filmed in Czech-French-Slovak co-production, whose screening will be attended by the creators and the movie Forman vs. Forman (Helena Třeštíková, Jakub Hejna, 2019), which received the Audience Award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.

The film program will be complemented by lectures and discussions with creators and experts. One of the discussions will be devoted to the media “in the era of ones and zeros” and Czech and Slovak journalists will discuss there the current and future trends in the media sphere. Another discussion will focus on numbers in independent culture and cultural events organizers will talk about the challenges and problems they have to face. The accompanying events program will also include concerts, evening parties and art exhibitions. 

During the 4 Elements, there will be also the UŠAMI (EARS) workshop that will focus on sound design or rather its subcategory – field recording. Pre-registered participants will have the opportunity to learn the basics of field recording and post-production of the collected material with the help of Slovak and Czech experts. Is it possible to capture the atmosphere of a city through sound? How is a sound map of Banská Štiavnica created and can we compare it with the past or predict its future? The workshop will be looking for answers to these and other questions during the 4 Elements.

Every year, creative activities are also part of the 4 Elements for Kids, the program for the whole family. This year, in addition to the animation workshop for pre-registered kids, it will also offer an open art workshop and screenings of special films for children audiences that can also be enjoyed by adults. They include, for example, the new Czech-Slovak fairytale The Watchmaker’s Apprentice (Jitka Rudolfová, 2019), which will be presented at the festival by a delegation of its creators.

More information about the program of the 21^st Summer Film Festival 4 Elements, together with the information about discounted admission, can be found at www.4zivly.sk.