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/

The crowdfunding is over. WE REACHED THE GOAL!

181 patrons supported MY NAME IS JANEZ JANSA

THANK YOU! HVALA! GRAZIE! DANKE! GRACIAS! MERCI! TAK!

The crowdfunding campaign went far beyond our expectations: the movie got an injection of 7185 Euro. Now there’s no more »maybe« and »perhaps«…

WE ARE GOING TO FINISH THIS DAM MOVIE. IT’S A FACT!

Janez

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

I started to work around the idea of making this movie about names, homonymy and name changes, long time ago. Now I’m about to finish it. But recently Janez Janša, my name sake, came back to power and the perception of my work has taken a drastic distortion, especially in the media. In some of the press the movie has been labeled as “degenerate art” (Heil!), in other as pornography produced with public money, and the director of the film studios VIBA Film (our technical partner, where we suppose to finish the sound mix) is pulling-out of the project…

Nevertheless, we decided to finish the film professionally and to screen it soon in Slovenia and around the word. This is why we launched a crowdfunding call.

Crowdfunding is a way to finance projects collectively, from the bottom up is to say.

How does it work?

You have an idea. You publish it on a crowdfunding platform and you indicate the rewards you offer in exchange of contributions (merchandising, special editions, access to downloads, etc). Then you open the call and start looking for supporters. A project is successfully funded when it raises 100% of its funding goal within 40 days. You are charged at the end of the campaign and only if the project reaches its goal!

Now we are in the middle of this process for our film My Name Is Janez Janša. 62 patrons gave us already their support! THANKS TO ALL OF THEM!

There’s a long way to go to reach the goal though and you can be with us.

THE MORE WE ARE THE FASTER WE WILL REACH OUR GOAL!

Yours sincerely… Janez!

Margareta Winberg, Sweden

vs

Janez Janša, Slovenia

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

Chioggia represents a unique demographic case in Italy, and world-wide I’d say: because of the exceptional number of people bearing the same surname: either Boscolo or Tiozzo. I’ve looked in the phone book for Angelo Boscolo and I found about 40 of them!
The postmen were losing their minds, everybody’s surname was Boscolo…

Read more: http://www.italymag.co.uk/italy/arts-and-culture/calling-names

2007 should have been a great year for name changing. Just few months after the name change of the three Slovenian artists another great name change took place this time at the Superior Court of California: an Americans artist succeeded in legally changing her name from Kristin Sue Lucas to… Kristin Sue Lucas! The title of her action is Refresh. When the Judge asserted that this is not really a change the artist answered:

I should have brought a philosopher…

Kristin and I became immediately FB friends and later on we meet live in New York. The last time it was in May 2011 when we shot the reconstruction of »Refresh« for my documentary. Here it goes the clip:

Here you can find the entire transcript from the court hearings. Worth reading!

http://www169.pair.com/klucas/before_after/refresh_transcript.pdf

As I promised some time ago here I post the link to the English translation of the very first review of the movie My Name Is Janez Janša!

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