At the Visegrad Film Forum, craft comes first. “At most festivals, films are the primary attraction, and filmmakers are an added value; at the Visegrad Film Forum, it’s the opposite,” noted managing director Jakub Viktorín (see the interview). That overarching philosophy defined the 13th edition of the Bratislava-based educational event (11-14 March – see the news) intended for film students and the general public.

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Through master classes, screenings and discussions, students from across Europe, including FAMU in Prague, the Łódź Film School, the Budapest Film School, the University of Television and Film Munich, and the Georgian National Film School in Tbilisi, were brought into direct contact with internationally recognised filmmakers and craftspeople. The forum’s deliberately “informal and accessible” environment aims to prepare young talents for the realities of an international industry without exerting the pressure commonly found at major festivals.

Among the guests were Oscar-winning British sound designer Chris Munro, whose collaborators include Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, Paul Greengrass, Ron Howard, Alfonso Cuarón and M Night Shyamalan; and renowned US special-effects artist Shane Mahan, who has worked on films by James Cameron, John Carpenter and Guillermo del Toro, including The Terminator, Predator and The Shape of Water.

Hungarian auteur György Pálfi approached filmmaking as an intuitive, almost elusive, practice. Reflecting on his creative process during his master class, he emphasised the importance of remaining open to fragmentation, “accidents” and shifts in direction, describing cinema less as execution than as discovery. For Pálfi, ideas often emerge from unexpected impulses: “You just collect things, images and situations, and suddenly, you realise there is a film there,” he explained. He encouraged students to embrace uncertainty as an integral part of the process, warning that overplanning can suffocate a movie’s vitality. His master class ultimately framed filmmaking as an act of sensitivity, recognising when disparate elements begin to cohere, and having the courage to follow that fragile intuition.

German production designer Uli Hanisch offered a complementary perspective rooted in construction. Drawing on projects such as Babylon Berlin and The Hunger Games, he stressed that production design is not about assembling references, but about building a coherent world from within. “It must be the picture of the world you are creating,” he noted, underscoring that sets are narrative tools shaped by the story’s internal logic. Recounting his work with limited budgets and unconventional locations, including the transformation of found spaces, he demonstrated how constraints can become a catalyst for invention. For emerging filmmakers, his message was clear: convincing cinematic worlds are defined not by scale, but by consistency and imagination.

Romanian filmmaker Alexander Nanau based his master class on his direct experience, offering one of the forum’s most detailed explorations of observational documentary practice. Drawing on Toto and His Sisters [+lire aussi :
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fiche film], he described filmmaking as a prolonged process of uncertainty, shaped by trial and error, where meaning only emerges over time. “Things that don’t work are basically 80% of the work,” he noted, emphasising the need to film, review and re-evaluate material before a story reveals itself. Central to his method is the relationship with his subjects, built on curiosity and equality, rather than authority: “You are not above them; you are the same.” At the same time, he acknowledged the ethical and emotional complexity of such work, from negotiating access to confronting the limits of intervention.

If the Visegrad Film Forum is built on dialogue, it ultimately finds its purpose in the students themselves. Reflecting on the showcased student works, Nanau praised the films as “incredible”, noting they were “deep and really concerned with the world”, a response that encapsulates the forum’s role as both a space of transmission and a platform for emerging voices.