RUSTLING LANDSCAPES

Rustling Landscapes addresses the complications of life and love as they affect those about to hit their thirties. As a relationship falls apart, and as love, belonging, sensitivity, stubbornness and misunderstanding come into play, the characters are propelled towards dawn, when it's time to sober up. The audience can decide for themselves whose side they're on.

Rustling Landscapes is the first full-length Slovenian film to feature an improvised screenplay; this meant in-depth and painstaking work with the actors involved. The film was shot in two weeks without a shooting script.

The film was not made via the established route. The majority of Slovenia’s film makers usually wait for prior state blessing in the form of funds. This team boldly went ahead with the production, finished the film and only then approached the Slovenian Film Fund for the transfer to 35 mm.

The director decided that the story should unfold in a pretty remote environment, before realising that this environment was provided perfectly by Bela Krajina (a very quiet, rural backwater, on the south-eastern fringe of Slovenia, some 100 km from Ljubljana). He wanted to keep the cast in a ‘creative quarantine’ there on location throughout the shooting. Locating the story in this remote environment allowed the young couple, Katarina and Luka, to play out their growing problems within four walls, and away from the public gaze.