Favourite music film director Julien Temple, who has documented the biggest stars of rock and pop for almost half a century, returns to the hill of film as the winner of the festival’s honorary Maverick Award • Ticket presale at most affordable prices kicks off!
The new edition of Cinehill is still a little more than a month away and we’re preparing for you a whole lot of film treats, musical and literary events, and fun activities in the magical nature of Gorski Kotar. Fourteen years after his first visit to the Motovun Film Festival, one of the most important veterans of rock documentary filmmaking, British director Julien Temple joins us in Gorski Kotar, above Delnice, this time as the winner of the honorary Maverick Award, awarded for cinematographic courage and expanding the boundaries of cinematic expression.
A well-known name to all fans of punk and music documentaries, Temple is a director whose work embodies the most important values of Cinehill – erasing established boundaries, breaking rules, unbridled creativity and, above all, the revolutionary power of art. This great documentarian began his career in the 1970s, making films about the pioneers of punk and masters of provocation, the Sex Pistols, going on to build an impressive filmography filled with collaborations with the biggest legends of rock music. The Clash, Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Neil Young, Judas Priest, Depeche Mode, and even Whitney Houston and Janet Jackson are just some of the many names we associate with Temple’s directorial work, from documentaries and feature films to music videos. On top of that, music videos for songs by Neil Young (“This Note’s for You”) and David Bowie (“Day-In Day-Out”) brought him two Grammys.
“It is with great pleasure that we support the arrival of Julien Temple at Cinehill and we are glad that the festival has decided to introduce the audience in Croatia to his work. Julien is one of the icons of our music and film scene, having collaborated with fantastic artists such as David Bowie, Grace Jones, the Sex Pistols, The Kinks, and Madness, and he also made a film about the legendary British Glastonbury festival”, said Simon Thomas, the British Ambassador to Croatia, who has supported the implementation of this program. “Temple’s films on Petehovac are a wonderful amalgam of British and Croatian filmmaking and culture in general. I am glad that the Cinehill audience, for whom British films, books and music are already part of their life and informal education, will have the opportunity to get to know Julien Temple and his work.”
In the manner of his punk favourites to whom he returns again and again, Temple became a director almost by chance. He was not at all interested in film until he discovered Jean Vigo at the studio, a French director whose films and anarchist spirit greatly influenced the directors of the French New Wave, and Temple later made a film about him titled Jean Vigo: Passion for Life, 1998. “I didn’t watch movies as a kid, but when I started college and encountered Jean Vigo’s works, I was automatically hooked on films”, admitted Temple during his first visit to Motovun. Such role models inscribed transgression into the very foundations of Temple’s creativity, which he has remained faithful to this day, while the punk spirit that attracted him to music is also reflected in his directorial oeuvre, never shying away from risks. By his own admission, such an approach nearly drove him to financial ruin when he made Absolute Beginners in 1986. Today a cult classic, at the time the film was a total box-office flop, which some in part blame for the collapse of the production company Goldcrest. But even then, the film had its fans including Michael and Janet Jackson, which paved the way for new collaborations.
A fervent chronicler of punk rock, Temple left an indelible mark on music history with films such as The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle (1980), in which he follows the rise and fall of the Sex Pistols from the perspective of their manager Malcolm McLaren. It is a thrilling pseudo-documentary comedy completely blurring the line between reality and fiction (or truth and lies), in which some of the band members refused to participate. He balanced the scales in 2000 with the documentary The Filth and the Fury (2000), in which the surviving members of the band finally tell their side of the story. In 2006, this was followed by Glastonbury, a documentary capturing thirty years of this great music festival, and a year later, with the acclaimed tribute to his close friend and frontman of The Clash – Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten (2007).
At Cinehill, we are showing one of his best works, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, (2020), awarded a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. It is an intimate and completely quirky ode to the Irish musician and founder of the Celtic punk band The Pogues, combining never-before-seen archive footage, animation and interviews with MacGowan and his close friends and family. A film about true punk, a life without compromise and a poetic legend – Shane MacGowan.
It is just one of the many titles that await you in the rich offer of this year’s program, for which you can grab your tickets starting this Monday. For all those who like to watch a lot of films, two different ticket bundles – the Big Hill and Little Hill – at the most affordable prices are available in presale, starting Monday, 16 June. The packages are available in online presale only until 7 July, while individual ticket sales start on 8 July. More information is available in the section Tickets, while you can buy your ticket bundles on the following link.
This year’s Cinehill will be held from 24 to 28 July at the Petehovac mountain resort and the surrounding towns with the support of the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County, the Tourist Boards of Kvarner and Gorski Kotar, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre and the City of Delnice.
