History of Love / Slovenia / Southern U.S. Premiere

Seventeen-year-old Iva is in the process of coming to terms with the death of her mother. Influenced by this deep personal loss and by the discovery that she didn’t know everything about her mom, the girl slowly immerses herself into a strange, almost dreamlike world far from reality.

Awards:

Slovenian OSCAR Candidate 2020
Karlovy Vary IFF 2018 Main Competition: Grand Jury Special Mention
Slovenian Film Festival 2018: Best Original Film Achievement
Slovenian Film Festival 2018: Best Cinematography Award
Festival of New Film 2018: Special Festival Prize
Slovenian Directors Guild: Award for Exceptional Directing 2019
National Guild of Cinematographers: Best Photography in a feature film Award 2019
Al Este Colombia 2019 Best Feature Film

Director Statement

In my first film The Tree, I focused on three distinct forms of imprisonment – physical, within a system, and by our own feelings of guilt – all of this by means of a single story about a blood feud. During the shooting of the film a member of my Family was dying and later on I decided to venture away from this kind of commentary on a social issue in order to follow the intimate tale of Iva and her family. However, the urge to explore the characters' inability to connect with each other during the worst moments of their lives still derives from a reflection on society: the currently prevalent nihilism, violence, and emotional detachment. One of the possible oppositions to this, which I have tried to keep in mind while making the film, is beauty as an aesthetic as well as an ethical category. I focused on Iva, confronted with her mother’s past that she cannot accept. As we all are, she is drawn to judging, labelling. Only when she is able to understand (or at least allow a possibility that there is something she doesn't understand) and to perceive different points of view, she can develop compassion for the human condition. In this sense History of Love is also a coming-of-age film.