Blind Spot

In a block of flats at the edge of town the local children enjoy playing basketball in their courtyard. When their grumpy neighbor confiscates their basketball the children decide to go on an elaborate rescue mission to retrieve it.

L.V. Strocki is a traveling film projectionist in the best years. He is a representative of the first generation who watched partisan films, lived to see the invasion of the television and ended up among vampires. In the coastal region town he is preparing a film projection on the town square and a television team is making a documentary about this event. During the film projection about the heroines and heroes of an occupied town, a Heroine in a seductive outfit comes to see Strocki in his projection booth.

2009, Slovenia. For 30 years, Alija, the miner, has been one of the many Bosnian immigrant workers. Due to the crisis, miners are losing jobs. Alija is sent to check an abandoned mine. His task is to quickly make sure the mine is empty before management sells the company. But in the mine, Alija finds hidden proof of executions after WWII. He is told to stop digging and report the mine empty. He decides to continue, although he is risking his job. Alija discovers thousands of executed people. He informs the police. He found women among the dead. Some of them were civilians, missing persons, just like his sister that was lost in the 1995 genocide in Bosnia. Alija is convinced the victims need to be brought out, identified and buried. But there is no interest in doing that. The mine is proclaimed a WWII military grave and walled in. The dead will stay unburied. Alija loses his job and struggles to preserve his dignity.

The film is a high-concept project with five stories exploring the themes of motherhood and pregnancy, directed by women filmmakers from five former Yugoslav republics. “Croatian Story” follows an anguished painter who must decide whether or not to keep one of her unborn twins, diagnosed with Down syndrome. “Serbian Story” finds an expectant mother in the same emergency room with a charming killer. “Bosnia-Herzegovina Story” centers on a financially strapped Sarajevo family whose son?s lover is pregnant. “Macedonian Story” unfolds in a clinic where a drug addict struggles to keep her baby, and “Slovenian Story” ends the omnibus on a humorous note with a nun who finds her own way to immaculate conception.

19 filmmakers from ten european countries selected by Mike Figgis for a Masterclass by the European Film Academy come to Slovenia in a challenging mission: to conceive, shoot, complete a 90m feature film in seven days and screen it on the day after in a cinema for the public.

On a barren island, a mother and son confront years of silence and misunderstandings in writer-director Hanna Slak’s formidable fourth feature film starring Maren Eggert, scored by Amélie Legrand, and shot by Claire Mathon.