After being invited to the Ljubljana Video-Film Dance Festival, organized by the Ljubljana Dance Theater (Plesni Teatre Ljubljana) 10 years ago, Van Daele fell in love and decided to move here. His background in film. He studied to become a director but quit after 2 years to begin working at the Flemish Institute, responsible for the Audio/Video department – which brought avant guard theaters and performance art to Belgium and the Benelux countries, as well as promoted performance art from Belgium abroad. He then went on to found and work for a Brussels-based production and distribution company, responsible for distributing and producing art related films and video, and also organized festivals, mostly interdisciplinary. According to Van Daele, there was a big revival of performance art in Belgium in the 80’s, and also a quite active exchange between the cultural scenes of the Slovenes and Flemish.

You came to Slovenia upon an invitation to attend the PTL festival, fell in love and decided to remain here. Was it difficult finding work?

I always considered myself privileged, I’ve never found difficulty in doing the kinds of things that I wanted to do. The moment that I came (to Slovenia), there was a kind of openness for the kind of work that I was involved with in Belgium, so what I did was I "released a lot of balloons". For example, I heard that the Film Art Festival was planning to start a documentary section, so I went to them and asked if they had any ideas and they told me to come up with some proposals. So I came up with an idea, and started the first documentary section within the Ljubljana Film Festival.

Or when I heard that the Governmental Office for Women’s Policy had an idea to start a women’s art festival, I immediately went to visit them and introduced myself. And it went on with Kinoteka, at the time doing little projects and taking little proposals, and of course, in the beginning, there were moments of despair because all of the things were very low budget… the money being offered was absolutely not enough to live off of, so I had to do many, many things in parallel. I think I only had a couple of months where I thought to myself, "Okay, it’s time to start washing dishes", but then things turned around.

I have always been reluctant to work for institutions because one of the problems is that you have to serve so many interests. Now, the nice thing about Kinoteka is that never, ever, are we forced to push the program in certain directions, directions which have nothing to do with artistic motivation. We are not being pushed by politics, or cultural politics, so we do what we want to do and, again, I feel privileged… but this doesn’t mean I only do what I like to do…(laughter). But the program is, of course, put together from different artistic interests. The main program is always the Retrospective, the second thing is what we call "the Serials" such as D Day, Animateka – for comics and animation, Kino-ear – silent film, live music, or everything on the intersection between image, experiment and music and their interaction. We are also hosting a Film Archive, Kinoteka Distribution Films, which, since there is no Arthouse cinema in the country, also represents these kinds of films as a Cinema-tech. This means that every year we buy between 10-15 new titles, we are not a competitor on the market and only buy films which we believe are important to be shown in Slovenia.

This coming October, however, by mandate of the ministry of Culture and the city of Ljubljana, Kinoteka will reopen Kino Dvor, which was the very first theater built for cinema in Ljubljana, in 1923. It will be renovated and turned it into the very first, fully dedicated Art-House cinema in Slovenia. Now, there will again be a cinema dedicated to quality, European and World cinema, mostly non-Hollywood cinema - in town. Kino Dvor will screen new releases, and Kinoteka will screen all other films as usual.

In the beginning I said I loved the idea. The Governmental Office for Women’s Policy were focusing on equal opportunity for men and women, and society in general, but had not done a lot of work within culture. So, with the setting up of this festival, they wanted to highlight that aspect of opportunity, but since they did not have a clear idea of how to do that, they hired a number of independent curators, and I was one of them. In the first festival there were some 50 events which took place in a week, and it really was a "city of women" taking place in all the venues, starting with early morning readings, panels and discussions, and late night concerts. After the experience of the first event, we thought it went well and should continue, so we decided to set up a non-governmental organization, the Association for the Promotion of Women in Culture, our prime objective being to organize an annual festival.