22/11/2018 - The provision, voted on unanimously, will bring the overall domestic film production budget from €4.5 to €11 million by 2022

The Slovenian parliamentary Culture Committee has officially approved the gradual increase of its national film production budget, following an intense meeting requested by the political party The Left on 13 November 2018. The topic at the heart of the meeting’s agenda was the structural weakness of the national film industry and the overwhelming brain drain of young Slovenian film professionals, who decide to move abroad to seek better working conditions and higher wages. 

The leader of The Left, politician and activist Luka Mesec, reported that Slovenia allocated a €8.5 million budget for local film industry in 2011 and confirmed that the National Culture Programme received an annual contribution of €11 million from 2014 to 2017. Nonetheless, the actual film production budget made available accounted for about a third of the total amount – €4.5 million a year. Mesec highlighted this negative record, which puts the national film industry at the tail end of European Union figures and those of other former Yugoslav republics. In comparison, the average budget for a Slovenian film is €800,000, while in Croatia it’s €1 million, in Hungary €2.4 million and in Italy €2 million.

The unexploited potential of the Slovenian film sector has also been noted by Vojko Stopar, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture, who welcomed the budget increase and added that other cultural industries are affected by similar problems and require urgent action. The announcement was also very well received by Nataša Bučar, the director of the Slovenian Film Centre, the country’s main film agency, which became operational in 2011 as a successor to the former Slovenian Film Fund.

Over the last few days, members of the Culture Committee were invited to attend the screening of Urša Menart’s latest feature My Last Year as a Loser [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Timon Sturbej
film profile] during this year’s edition of Ljubljana International Film Festival. The choice to screen Menart’s film is certainly not a coincidence. In fact, its plot revolves around Špela, a young art history graduate struggling to find ajob and working part-time as a receptionist, a swimming pool lifeguard and a bartender.