STA, 10 July 2019 - The 15th Grossmann Fantastic Film and Wine Festival will kick off on 16 July, featuring 35 full-length films, 12 documentaries and 43 short films from 38 countries. Guests of honour will be Israeli-American director Sam Firstenberg and Swedish actress Christina Lindberg.
Firstenberg is a legendary film-maker of the 1980s action films, famous for making low-budget B-films of various genres, including horror and science fiction, while Lindberg is one of the most iconic stars of exploitation films of the 1970s.
One of her controversial characters served as an inspiration for a character in Quentin Tarantino's film Kill Bill, with the acclaimed director considering Lindberg his muse.
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The guests of honour will receive awards for outstanding contribution to genre films at the festival's closing ceremony on 20 July, with retrospective screenings paying homage to both of them.
Six feature films will be competing for the festival's main award, the Vicious Cat, said programme manager Tomaž Horvat, adding that most screenings will be attended by the films' directors as well.
One of the programme's highlights will be the Slovenian first showing of the sequel Iron Sky: The Coming Race by Finnish director Timo Vuorensola, which blurs the lines between comedy, action film and science fiction. The famous Slovenian group Laibach wrote the score for the film and two of its members will be at the screening along with the director.
Seven films will be in the running for the Noisy Cat award for the best musical documentary, while 13 shorts from around the world will compete for the Slak's Vicious Cat award.
This year's record number of guests includes Austrian director Severin Fiala, who will present The Field Guide to Evil, a collection of horror stories, and Croatian director Predrag Ličina, who will introduce his film The Last Serb in Croatia, the first Croatian zombie comedy.
Another highlight will be the US documentary George Romero - An Independent Man, portraying Romero's journey of being an independent film-maker in the mainstream film world.
According to Horvat, Ljutomer, a north-eastern Slovenian town, is becoming too small for the popular festival. A couple of additional performances will be thus staged in the near-by town of Ormož this year.
The programme will also include workshops, concerts, a theatrical performance, book presentations and wine tastings.
The festival is named after Slovenia's first amateur film-maker, the Ljutomer-based lawyer Karol Grossmann (1864-1929), who shot his first two short films in the town in 1905.
More details can be found at the festival’s website
http://www.grossmann.si/
