FIRST FILMS FIRST TALKS: Darko Sinko

As he is finishing the editing of his humorous existentialist thriller INVENTORY, our FIRST FILMS FIRST fellow alumnus Darko Sinko opens up about surprising mix of films he watches these days, recommends a Slovenian classic and shares insights from the shooting of his debut feature.

• What films do you recommend to watch during self-isolation?

I don\’t have any special recommendations. Also, unlike so many people around the world, for me, this time isn\’t really the best time to watch films. At least I don\’t manage to watch them a lot. I did watch some of the worldwide famous films from last year that I missed, Oscar candidates and such, but I mostly watch them on fast forward and click-click-click forward. The films that I watched normally are mainly cartoons like KUNG FU PANDA, some old black and white noir films from the \’50s (like Nicholas Ray\’s IN A LONELY PLACE) that I accidentally found on one disk – and were probably part of preparations for my film INVENTORY – and some documentaries of Werner Herzog. Maybe I would recommend the latter.

• What classic film from your country would you recommend to everyone to see?

One of Slovenian film classics that I would recommend is DON\’T CRY, PETER! It\’s a WWII story about two Partisans, buddies, who are making troubles for Nazis by destroying railways with explosives but are always hoping for more glorious actions and battles. To their fortune, their next mission is a real disappointment. Their task is to take three kids, orphans, to an already liberated territory of Slovenia. So to anybody who might be interested in a well-directed family-comedy-partisan film, I might recommend this one. It\’s a film that everybody in Slovenia knows. To get a hint of a feeling – I remember a scene in Alfonso Cuarón\’s Roma, where a family is watching television together. Television in films is often shown as something noisy, stupid, and aggressive, but in this scene, there is a sense of a nice memory of home and a warm family moment. That\’s how I remember DON\’T CRY, PETER, like a film we would always watch together at home when it was on television.

• How are you dealing with current pandemic situation?

For me, the days are just packed, with organizing family, work and myself.

• How is work on INVENTORY going on these days?

Before the pandemic, I was close to finishing the editing. Now I try to edit, but it\’s going slowly. Nevertheless, we started some work regarding sound post-production, CGI, and music. We were shooting last year and it was both an interesting and exhausting experience. I am thinking how funny it is – we get the idea, do scripts, moodboards, preparations, castings, rehearsals, so many people are working hard together to shoot a simple scene, etc. But still – in the editing, when you confront shots to build a scene, you cannot take for granted that you will come out with a scene that has something more than just two actors straining while delivering lines with a taste of paperwork.

So, I don’t know, perhaps the film is a mystery. We cherish the media of film for its documentary quality of portraying life, but for me, the film is perhaps closer to the artificiality of opera. And maybe that makes the film-making even more interesting.

INVENTORY is produced by Vlade Bulajic and supported by Slovenski filmski center / Slovenian Film Centre, RTV Slovenija, Viba film, Creative Europe – MEDIA, and RE-ACT.

More about Goethe-Institut’s FIRST FILMS FIRST project INVENTORY you can read here.