The director’s cut of My Name is Janez Janša is now available on-line for FREE with additional subtitles in English, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech and Croatian languages:

A special edition of the movie has been made for the Slovenian-speaking audience:

The liberation of the film is the final step of the triple publishing initiative [FREE] Janez Janša, a series of on-line publishing events inspired by the documentary film itself.

FREE Janez Janša started in December 2014 with the publishing of the essay What’s in a Name? by Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist and film critic Mladen Dolar. The essay takes us on a philosophical joy ride through the name and naming as well as the name changing of the three artists known as Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša.

The second publishing event involved the launch of a special guest blog. From January to May 2015 the “No Land’s Man” and pioneer of net.art Vuk Ćosić teased our curiosity and stimulated our intellectual desire by presenting a series of articulated blog posts on topics such as Names, Pseudonyms, Multiple Names, Improper names, etc.. The posts also included over 50 clips that never made it into the final cut of the film My Name is Janez Janša.

Contributions by Jan Fabre, Ubermorgen, Eva and Franco Mattes, Antonio Caronia, Tatiana Bazzichelli, Mladen Dolar, Marco Deseriis, Geoff Cox, Catherine Soussloff, Lev Kreft and many others have been collected HERE.

Getting ready to leave for a series of presentations and events in the UK. The schedule is quite intensive but the entire mini-tour looks promising.

On MON 8 at 6.30pm we screen My Name is Janez Janša at the Royal College of Arts in London (Battersea) as part of the RCA Film Series 2014/15.
The venue is called, Gorvy Lecture Theatre and the event is open to all. No admission fee. After the screening we’ll be there spending some time answering questions from the audience. Thanks to our friend Ben Dalton for organizing this!

The day after we move to Canterbury where we’ll have a talk at the University for the Creative Arts as part of their Visiting Lecturer Series. The event, in the framework of the exhibition Despite Efficiency: Labour, will start at 12.45pm sharp at the Cragg Lecture Theatre. It’s mostly meant for all Fine Art BA and MA students, but I’m sure one can manage to sneak in easily, if she really wants…

And finally on December 10 we are at the Turner Contemporary in Margate where we present Name Readymade (lecture/performance starting at 6pm), the concept of Collateral Art we are developing in the last couple of years, and the outlines of Trust, the upcoming net-based project we are developing together with UCA Canterbury.
This event is part of the public programme designed in parallel to the exhibition English Magic by Jeremy Deller.

Special thanks to Emma Braso for the coordination of this challenging set of events. We are really looking forward!

Janez, Janez, Janez

The jury of the Red House Art Doc Prize (Casa Rossa Art Doc), composed by Marco Antonio Bazzocchi (chairman), Ermanno Cavazzoni, Chiara Lagani, Cesare Malfatti and Valentina Vannicola, has assigned the award for best documentary dedicated to the art to My name is Janez Janša by Janez Janša, Janez Janša and Janez Janša, with the following motivation:

For the construction of the documentary, constantly surprising, for the originality of the theme, treated in narrative form with a very broad philosophical value, but regarding at the same time very specific cases. The jury has recognized and appreciated the ironic gaze on contemporary art and its paradoxes; on politics and its vulnerability and on the way a performance can leave the boundaries of the art territory and spread its tentacles into the social sphere.

Founded in 1983, the Bellaria Film Festival is one of the first Italian festival dedicated to independent cinema.
http://www.bellariafilmfestival.org/

19 March 2013. A special day for us. The day of the “Triplete” as José Mourinho would put it. Our movie My Name is Janez Janša was in fact screened in three different locations simultaneously: in a cinema hall in the town of Kranj, at the Oslo International Theaterfestival in Norway, and on TV SLO 1, the first channel of the Slovenian national television.

The TV screening happened at 9 pm, prime time, and got a share of 12.5 %, that correspond to 88.869 spectators. Not a bad result for a documentary movie. So… bravo Janša!

But, on the other hand, with this great shot, we lost the chance to screen further our doc at Kinodvor, the City Cinema of Ljubljana. Folks there maintain it makes no sense to keep it in their program after the TV broadcast.

Never mind. We are leaving Kinodvor after over 4 months of programming there and a total of 113 screenings.

Thanks Kinodvor for the professionalism and for the great experience. And thanks also to the TV SLO, of course. It was a pleasure to work with you!

Janez

Download the ringtone!

Finally the time for the screening of our movie in Ljubljana has come.

My Name Is Janez Janša will be screened twice at 23rd International Ljubljana Film Festival in the avantpremieres section, on Nov. 11th at 9 pm at Cankarjev dom and on Nov. 16th at 9.30 pm at Kinodvor in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

It has been said and written so much in the past about this movie, especially from people who never watched it and whose primary intention was the public discredit of its authors and stopping the movie from being released.

It has been said that “the movie is pornographic”. It has been hindered the production. It has been asked the Slovenian Film Center to consider withdrawing its financial support to this production. It has being written that the law in Slovenia will be changed in order to “provide legal grounds for the minister’s discretion management or elimination of such projects at his will”. It has been written that the movie is completely out of place as “instigates political mockery and hatred and discredit an individual”. It has been written that the documentary “is an audio-visual record of sorts, which could have been made for the internet by anyone, without them getting the taxpayers’ money to do it, of course”…

Now it’s about the time to set a mirror in front of these people.

Let’s screen the movie and see what the audience has to say. Looking forward!

Janez

“My name is Janez Janša” will be screened four times in four days at the Zagreb film festival! But let’s start from the beginning. Our documentary is one of the 16 selected for the documentary program at the 10th Zagreb film festival (ZFF). The film’s international premiere will take place just a fortnight after its first screening at the Slovenian Film Festival – that “bloody” Sunday at 10.30 a.m., remember?! And that’s not all. Ours is the only documentary in the program that will be screened four times (two screenings on October 18th and one on October 19th and 21st). Screenings will take place at the Grič Cinema, Dokukino DIC and Museum of Contemporary Art. Prime time, this time!

As quite some of the documentaries at this year’s ZFF represent artistic endeavors, Janez Janša will be in good company: Marina Abramović and Ai Weiwei among others.

Not a bad way to start…
All documentaries will compete for the Golden Pram Award and the author of the best film will receive the amount of 1,000 €. So keep your fingers crossed! For Weiwei, of course

I wonder how the movie will be perceived abroad. I’ll keep you posted on this.

Will the critics differ much from the Slovenian ones?

My Name Is Janez Janša is certainly one of the best Slovenian documentaries in recent years. It brings a seemingly abstract, philosophical issue into the field of social reflection and concretises it to its foundations. As such it will further trigger a multitude of interpretations, because it constantly moves on slippery ground, keeping the viewer in suspense. In addition, it realizes the medium of documentary filmmaking excellently: although it could be conditionally labelled a “talking heads” film, these heads are incorporated in an original and extremely dynamic form of presentation. The film would undoubtedly deserve the best documentary award at this year’s Festival of Slovenian Film…

— Ženja Leiler, Pogledi, 10.10.2012

Click, Janez

P.S. If you are in Zagreb come around. Janez, Janez and I will be there only on the 18th

Festival of Slovenian Film. I was there. And Janez Janša was there too, together with his fellow friend and artist Janez Janša.

How could we have missed the first official screening of our movie My Name Is Janez Janša after all?

The foyer of the auditorium was jam-packed. Good sign. But still I was a bit nervous. A lot of people decided to wake up early in the morning that day to see (at last!) this »controversial« movie. Quite a burden…

Finally the doors of the hall opened to the audience and folks flowed in. The lights went down and the movie started. All the senses of my body were in alert to capture the slightest reaction of the audience.

I should say that, as a matter of fact, the audience reacted exactly in the way I was predicting: laughing there where they suppose to laugh and being serious and focused there where the movie demanded a deeper reflection. But then something unexpected happened: during a certain key sequence of the movie the entire hall suddenly exploded in a long and spontaneous applause. Empathy raised to the power of ten! That meant to me far more that any prize anyone can ever give to this movie.
I know… I’m not telling you what sequence it was, neither the meaning this sequence has within the movie’s dramaturgy line … but, I can’t do it here, right now, on this blog. I rather invite you to attend on of the next screenings. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out yourself exactly what scene I was talking about.

THANKS FOLKS! THANKS FOR BEING WITH US!

Janez

Before coming to the premiere of the movie “MY NAME IS JANEZ JANŠA” you have the chance to attend the theater performance “THE MORE OF US THERE ARE, THE FASTER WE WILL REACH OUR GOAL” we (the Janšas) did in 2010.

Where? When? Click HERE and find out!

In the near future we will take it also to Bucharest and Munich.
If you are wondering whether the theater piece and the movie are the same thing, the answer is… NO!
The best it to come watching both and you will see what I mean

Click, Janez

After Janez Janša has seen this documentary, he will wish to be in a porn movie. He will wish to be in a hundred porn movies.

— Marcel Štefančič jr., Mladina, 18 May 2012.

The movie “My Name is Janez Janša” has been officially selected for the 15th Festival of Slovenian Film that will take place in Portorož, Slovenia, between 27-30 September 2012.

The movie is in competition for the best feature-length documentary and medium-length film and will be screened at the Auditorium of Portorož on Saturday 30 of September at 10.30 am!

This innovative screening hour proves the movie is rather harmless and inoffensive, and doesn’t contain pornographic scenes as some “eye-witness” suggested much before the movie was completed and released.

Where are you going then to spend your last Sunday morning of September?
Sunday mass or Janez Janša? The choice is hard, I know, but it’s yours!

Amen!