The 4 Elements Summer Film Festival chose chaos as the topic of this year’s edition

The holiday months favor film festivals, and one of those with the longest tradition is the 4 Elements Summer Film Festival. It takes place every year in Banská Štiavnica and focuses its program around one central topic. This year, it will be CHAOS. Visitors will be able to enjoy the films and accompanying events on August 10–14, 2022 in the cinema, cultural center, and city amphitheater, but also in local cafes and clubs.

The organizing team decided to dedicate the program to chaos, mainly because it is characteristic of the recent years that we have been going through as a society. It has become an often-used term, but we do not fully understand it as a phenomenon. The program of the event is therefore designed to help us understand chaos at least to the extent allowed by its nature.

A variety of films, which will fill out the five festival days, can help us with that. As is customary for 4 Elements, the program will feature films that differ in their perspective on the topic, genre, year of production, or country of origin. One of the oldest titles in the program will be the work of the surrealist, Luis Buñuel, who, based on the literary work of the scandalous Marquis de Sade, created the film The Golden Age (FR, 1930). Director and choreographer Bob Fosse’s masterpiece All That Jazz (USA, 1979) will bring to the screen of the Banská Štiavnica amphitheater the artist’s effort to balance his work and private life. The documentary film Maidan (UA, 2014) directed by Sergei Loznitsa about the events that shook Ukraine at the turn of 2013 and 2014, will bring to the program a reflection of today’s war chaos beyond our eastern borders. The film program of the festival will consist of a total of more than 30 films – feature and short, live-action, documentary, animated, and experimental, including several premieres of Slovak films, which the festival will reveal in the coming days.

In the accompanying program, visitors of the event can look forward to a lecture on chaos theory or several discussions. This time, experts will discuss the situation in war-torn Ukraine, but also why people need crises, and how the Slovak film community and institutions deal with the current chaos.

This time, too, the festival will include the so-called 4 Elements for Kids – a program for families with children. The youngest visitors can look forward to a thematic selection of films, a workshop, and a creative workshop. More detailed information about the overall program of the 24^th edition of the 4 Elements Summer Film Festival will continue to be added to the event’s website (www.4zivly.sk), where a pre-sale of cinepasses – festival accreditations is currently available.