Alex Chandon (INBRED)  Jaume
Balaguero (SLEEP TIGHT)

For the first time the International Jury split the top award of Vicious Cat  at the Grossmann Fantastic Festival of Film and Wine.

A notably strong feature competition marked the 8th edition of this lively event held in Ljutomer, centre of sultry Slovenia's famed wine region, with soaring temperatures and growing audiences, encouraged by the status of nearby Maribor as "European Capital of Culture".

Jaume Baluguero's Sleep Tight (Mientras Duermes), charting the nefarious nocturnal activities of the porter in a Barcelona apartment -house, and Alex Chandon's riotous rural spoof Inbred, showing parts of North Yorkshire tourists should never see, shared honours ex-aequo. The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Goran Markovic, whose  veteran comedy Who's That Singing Over There? is still cited as the best "Yugoslav" film.

Best Short was The Captured Bird by Jovanka Vuckovic(Canada) and the recommended short for the Melies Award was Legend(Leyenda) by Pau Texidor(Spain)

The six-day event opened with the aptly-nostalgic new Serbian film Dr Ray and His Devils, about Nicholas Ray's attempts to make a horror film in the region, directed with visual flair  and an international cast by Dinko Tuskovic. Although Ljutomer's only hotel has closed, guests were housed in wine hostelries around Jeruzalem, and screenings were supplemented by abundant tastings, excursions, art installations, neo-Goth concerts, and plenty to keep the children of the night active until well after sunrise.The Festival commemorates the name of Dr Karl Grossmann, an early pioneer of photography, who encouraged his friend Fritz Lang to take up the camera, between samples of Habsburg Rieslings, no doubt.

Phillip Bergson                 

www.grossmann.si