by InTrieste
The 37th edition of the Trieste Film Festival opens on Saturday morning at Teatro Miela, launching a day of screenings and cultural events that highlight Slovenian cinema and the festival’s longstanding engagement with Central and Eastern Europe.
The opening event, scheduled for 11 a.m., marks the start of Wild Roses, a section dedicated this year to Slovenian women filmmakers. The program opens with Moja Vesna (2022), directed by Sara Kern and first presented at the Berlin International Film Festival. The film follows a 10-year-old girl coping with the sudden death of her mother and the emotional fragmentation of her family.
The Wild Roses section continues throughout the day with four additional features spanning nearly two decades of Slovenian filmmaking. These include Installation of Love (2007) by Maja Weiss, a drama exploring the overlap between art and personal relationships; Woman of God (2023) by Maja Prettner, which examines faith and personal rupture through the story of a Protestant pastor leaving the church; and I Won’t Be a Loser Anymore (2018), Urša Menart’s debut feature about generational disillusionment among underemployed millennials. The section concludes in the evening with Ida, So Off-Key That Even the Dead Rose and Sang Along (2025) by Ester Ivakič, a recent winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Turin Film Festival.
Programming for younger audiences runs in parallel at the Ridottino of Teatro Miela as part of TSFF dei Piccoli. Morning and afternoon screenings include A Secret Delivery (2025), a Czech-Slovak-Serbian wartime adventure centered on children who rescue a French pilot, and Tales of the Enchanted Garden (2025), an animated film nominated for the 2026 European Film Awards. A stop-motion animation workshop introduces children to basic filmmaking techniques.
Later in the evening, the festival opens its Queer Visions section with the Italian premiere of The Activist (2025), directed by Romas Zabarauskas. The film follows a young man who infiltrates a radical neo-Nazi group to uncover the truth behind the murder of his LGBTQ+ activist partner.
Outside the screening rooms, the festival extends into the city with guided walks examining Trieste’s Slovenian cultural heritage and the urban history of Nova Gorica, a modernist city built after World War II along the Italian-Slovenian border.
Talks and public conversations accompany the screenings, including a morning discussion at Libreria Lovat inspired by Victoire Tuaillon’s book Il cuore scoperto, and an afternoon event dedicated to Yugo Logo, a long-running research project on graphic design in the former Yugoslavia.
Food, music and visual arts complete the opening-day program. A wine tasting at Caffè San Marco features organic wines from Slovenian winemaker Uroš Rojac, and the evening closes at Hangar Teatri with a concert by Doppelgänger, a Rome-born rapper of Bosnian heritage.
Opening on Saturday morning, the Trieste Film Festival positions itself once again as both a film event and a broader cultural platform rooted in the history and identity of a border city.
