Želimir Žilnik, recipient of the Anno Uno Award

Our long-standing friends from the I Mille Occhi festival will this year present the Anno Uno Award to the great director Želimir Žilnik, one of the key authors of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Žilnik, who received the Darko Bratina Award in 2006 and is also part of our retrospective Oriente East / Occidente West – The Border through Film and History (part of the official programme of the European Capital of Culture GO! 2025), is among those creators who have remained true to themselves and their artistic obsessions, regardless of prevailing trends. His oeuvre – from Early Works (Rani radovi, 1969) to his contemporary films, which observe migration and social change with a sensitive yet critical eye – reveals an uncompromising chronicler of the time and space we live in.

The award ceremony will take place on Saturday, 13 September 2025, at 9:00 p.m. at the Miela Theatre in Trieste, in collaboration with Kinoatelje from Gorizia / Nova Gorica and with the support of the Trieste Film Festival. The event builds on a long tradition of festival cooperation in the cross-border region, where filmmakers from different sides of the border have sought dialogue and a common language through the art of cinema. In this spirit, the award not only honours Žilnik’s remarkable oeuvre, but also the rich history of bridges woven in Trieste and Gorizia by passionate mediators of film culture, among them Piero and Annamaria Percavassi, Mario de Luyk, Rosella Pisciotta, Darko Bratina, Aleš Doktorič, Nereo Battello, Mirjam Koren and Vuk Babič.

The full festival programme is available on this link.

The programme also includes films from the Kino Basaglia selection.

May the cinematic paths take you across borders and languages – to the place where the magic of a shared gaze at the world through film happens.