film
For almost three decades, the collaboration between choreographer Iztok Kovač and film director Sašo Podgoršek developed a recognisable authorial signature within international audiovisual production, becoming one of the most distinctive and enduring artistic partnerships in European dance film. Their body of films expanded the possibilities of dance on screen.
Emerging from the experimental atmosphere of Slovenian contemporary dance in the 1990s, the duo shaped a hybrid cinematic language that resists conventional categorisation. In the words of Slovenian film theorist Stojan Pelko: "These are not ‘dance moments captured on film’; rather, it is as if the film itself begins to dance, and as if dance is refracted through the image as a visual-musical orchestration."
Critics noted how these works embedded contemporary dance within a wider social memory. The camera did not merely document movement; it mediated between two parallel worlds:
the highly formalised world of dance and the rule-bound world of industrial labour, producing a poetic tension that became the signature of their practice.
This is how their films accommodate dialogue, silence and the raw presence of voices while remaining unmistakably choreographic in the way they think time.
Through the eye of the camera, we witness a dizzying impossibility: a search for a new — even more dizzying — choreographic ground, as Kovač ascends the 365-metre chimney of the Trbovlje Power Station, transforming height, reality and time into a single suspended moment. Half man, half bird, carrying flight within but unable to truly fly away.
Eda Čufer, 1997
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Trbovlje – the workers’ town and the shaping of an aesthetic.
The visual and conceptual foundation of the duo’s cinematic language developed in the industrial landscape of Trbovlje, Kovač's birth town. For almost three decades, a former mining town with 200 years of history profoundly marked both artists’ sensibility and became their “natural Hollywood” — a raw environment of mines, chimneys, concrete and abandoned structures that offered not only visual power but also historical depth.
Their early films were conceived as tributes to this environment. Dance bodies entered spaces of heavy labour, not as visitors but as continuations of the physical intelligence already embedded in those locations. The contrast between trained dancers and industrial surroundings revealed itself as a continuation rather than opposition: both miners and dancers inhabited worlds governed by discipline and endurance.
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All our dance films are a tribute to Trbovlje, as the town offered us an exceptional environment and we could, over twenty years, record an incredibly interesting period for the valley, the gradual decline in the 200-year-old tradition of mining and the end of an industrial era. Vašhava, though, is a requiem.
With this film we bid farewell to Trbovlje, just as during the filming of Vašhava, mining also came to a close in this valley. Emotional reactions of vigorous men who from generation to generation proudly handed down their ‘noble’ mission, descending into the darkness and coming back up into the light, were eerie. I do not recall the last time I experienced something so deeply sad, such a collective emptiness that tore through time.
Many of the locations where we filmed our shots over the last twenty years have already been totally wiped off the face of this earth by passage of time. With the closing of the mine fell the last gang of the Trbovlje of my youth. That is why Vašhava is a requiem.
For the last time, we entered the places where my father, grandfather, and uncles once worked with their hands and bodies, inhabiting them through our own presence and energy, fusing for the last time the seemingly infusible —their work and our movement, the past and the present, inheritance and transformation, in order to finally confirm our identity.
Iztok Kovač, 2014
Evolution
I) Beginnings
As Stojan Pelko writes, "before saying a single word, even before any thought on the film cooperation between Iztok Kovač and Sašo Podgoršek is triggered, there are two images of Kovač, his vertiginous standing on one leg with his arms spread like wings right at the top of the Trbovlje Chimney (Vertigo Bird) and the scissoring legs as his body pushes itself away from a vertical rock face (Dom Svobode). On both occasions it is not entirely clear whether the rope to which he is attached is there in case he fell into the depths or protecting him from an indulgent drive to take off."
It is precisely this duality that defines the creative partnership between Kovač and Podgoršek. Kovač’s ability to recognise and persistently develop expressive bodies charged with a powerful, primal energy, shaped through numerous stage productions, meets Podgoršek’s ability to “capture” them within a cinematic space that seems almost made for film. Both artists often describe their practice as riding the edge between structure and unpredictability — a continuous negotiation between choreography and cinematic perception.
II) Shaping a film language
From early works, which inserted dance into the language of mining culture and explored the very foundations of cinematic movement, to later films where dialogue, sound and philosophical reflection became as important, the duo kept redefining the relationship between film and choreography. Critics described it as a meta-cinematic gesture — works in which film analyses itself through dance, and dance discovers new meaning through the camera.
The charm of Vertigo Bird lies in the fact that it attempts to reintegrate words into dance. Vertigo Bird is a meta-film, a film about a film attempting to return to dance, and at the same time a film about dance attempting to show film a trick or two.
Marcel Štefančič jr.
III) Archive of disappearance
As mining declined and the industrial era drew to a close, the films inadvertently became an archive of disappearance. Locations that once defined the visual identity of their work were demolished or erased over time. The film Vašhava, created at the moment when mining in the valley definitively ended, stands as a requiem — both for an industrial culture and for a landscape that shaped a generation. Emotional reactions of miners and the collective sense of closure echoed through the film, transforming it into a farewell gesture to a world that had sustained the duo’s artistic imagination.
IV) New sites
Their newest film, The Last White Bisons marks both a continuation and a radical shift. After nearly thirty years of collaboration shaped by industrial spaces, the newest film consciously departs from the aesthetics of Trbovlje. Following the disappearance of their former industrial “natural habitat,” the creators chose a visual environment of neutrality, whiteness and vacuum. This shift marks a conceptual transition: from the heavy materiality of labour landscapes toward an abstract space where existential and political questions become exposed differently. Inspired by the essayistic thinking of Ilija Trojanow, the film reflects on overpopulation narratives, climate devastation, neoliberal labour logic and the paradoxical fascination with apocalyptic imaginaries in late capitalism.
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