Stories from the Chestnut Woods
Original title: Zgodbe iz kostanjevih gozdov
2019 | 81 minutes | Slovenia
Director: Gregor Bozic
Writers: Gregor Bozic & Marina Gumzi
Languages: Italian, Slovenian
Slovene Film Festival, Best Feature Film
Slovene Film Festival, Best Director
Slovene Film Festival, Audience Favourite
Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Best First Feature
Set in a decaying forest on the Yugoslavian-Italian border in the years immediately after World War II, Stories From The Chestnut Woods weaves its fairy tale tinged stories of survival in an area between Italy and Slovenia named Slavia-Veneta, perched on the frontier where the Iron Curtain meets Western Europe.
In this forest lives an older man named Mario, known locally as the Stingy Carpenter. Competitive and stubborn, Mario is obsessed with money. Always working, neglectful of those closest to him, he even fails to notice his wife has fallen gravely ill. Meanwhile, Mario befriends Marta, a young woman known as the Last Chestnut Seller, who tends to the nearby chestnut groves after her husband's disappearance.
In this haunted, perhaps even enchanted region, these two lonely figures contemplate their future. It offers a stark choice: staying put in this impoverished postwar hinterland, or, as others are doing, climbing on the nearest farmer’s cart and go rattling off into the unknown world beyond.
A promising young talent in Slovenian cinema, Gregor Bozic shot this his first feature on 35mm celluloid, which gives this episodic, magic realist tale its rich palette and visual poetry. Stories had its North American premiere in the ‘Discovery’ section of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
- Tom McSorley
Preceded by the short film
Jarvik
As the summer is coming to an end, teenager Léa needs to breathe but her brother's mechanical heart constantly reminds her that life hangs by a thread.
Connected by a slow, poetic pace and a lush forest backdrop, Jarvik and Stories from the Chestnut Woods share tales of survival set in two different centuries and two very different worlds.