Corrado Premuda (CP): We meet Damjan Kozole that gave the start to the Alpe Adria — Trieste Film Festival 2004, with his film “Rezervni deli”.

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Hi, good morning. I’d like to ask you something about your film. In this film you speak about a lot of Slovenian typical aspects of this recent period, starting from clandestine immigrants, but speaking also about Krsko and its nuclear plant, cancer, many social facts… also globalization or the entering of Slovenia in the European Union. Which was your idea making this movie? Did you want to speak about Slovenia in a social way or something else?

Damjan Kozole (DK): First of all, hello. Yes, actually I talked about time and about place where we are living. Slovenia is in a specific situation: we are some kind of sanitarian cordon for the European Union. We will become member of the European Union in few months now and on the other hand we have many heritage from former regime, from former Yugoslavia and there is some completely new situation with these immigrants. But just to take stories about immigrants was too easy for me, too cheap, and my decision was that I must speak about Slovenian side, about this human traffic, about morality, about ethics of these guys who are ferrying to the other side (from Slovenia to Italy, nda) these poor people. And also there is a story about Krsko, Krsko is my home town, I was born right there and I lived there all my childhood. On the other hand cancer is not a Slovenian typical illness… So I tried to speak about one part of reality in my country.

CP: What is creativity for you? I mean the creative process when you start thinking bout a movie and then you make this movie.

DK: My way is maybe a little bit specific because I’m using a lot of information from news papers, from many sites, so I’m checking a lot of materials, a lot of information and this is material for my work. I’m also preparing a new project which is also some kind of true story, so I’m using reality to put it in some kind of feature and fiction film which is based on a true story.

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CP: Which are the responsibilities of an artist, of a director? Responsibilities in front of the audience, in front of your country…

DK: First of all I have to tell that my films are pretty dark, pretty black, pretty depressive, but everything is not so black, not so depressive in my country. But if you asking me what is the responsibility, my opinion is that we must talk about our problems, not always about just sunny sites of life but also about problems, about social problems, about many problems which are there, and especially in our country. We could also speak about problems in Italy or Croatia or our neighbours but first we must talk about our problems and our reality.

CP: Some months ago I spoke with a Slovenian art curator, Barbara Novakovic from Lubiana, and she told me now that Slovenia is joining the European Union there is a kind of specific sense of identity of Slovenian people but also something that belongs to the Balcans’ cultural area. Do you agree with this feeling?

DK: Yes, of course. We had part of the Balcanian identity, we had more then ninety years of Yugoslavian identity and experience… and we are also Slavic people like Croatians or Serbians, so this is another reason. The third reason is language which is quite near so… I completely agree, yes. We had some part of Middle European experience and a part of Balcans experience and Slovenia is some kind of cultural mixture of this, which is pretty specific and I mean a privileged situation for us.

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CP: After this beautiful movie you just made last year do you have now some projects, something new to work?

DK: Right these days I will shoot one part of Omnibus which is produced by Denmark and the title is Regions of Europe: they choose twenty five directors from twenty five members of the European Union and they put just a small budget and five minutes and the subject is Europe and you can do what you want. So I will shoot this project and I’m preparing something for Slovenian national television and I’m also developing some new projects… so I’m working quite hard!