If you’ve ever been on any kind of skate trip with a group of people you don’t know especially well, you’ll be familiar with the delirium-induced in-jokes that present themselves. These may take the form of repetition from a viral Youtube clip, a line from a song, or verbatim quotes from people on the trip. Often, there are more than one of these ridiculous phrases swirling around and entering the lexicon, constantly morphing and expanding, becoming a kind of language that only the people present can understand, only to be extinguished the moment the group disperses on to their separate journeys home.
During my first visit to Fažana back in 2016, the prevailing repetitive joke, originating in the still-a-little-drunk-from-the-night-before-induced madness of a seaside breakfast, was the concept of quite literally anything being a museum. The sea? That’s the water museum. The road? The car museum. The restaurant that sold five different gnocchi dishes? Well, that’s the gnocchi museum of course. This ‘joke’, as you can imagine, can be expanded in a limitless number of ways, however funny or unfunny in hindsight. “So, should we all meet at 6pm, just outside the medicine museum?”
What sets Vladimir Film Festival apart from quite literally any other skate event I’ve ever attended, is that the size of the village and the limited number of venues at the organisers’ disposal means that there are many kinds of repetition. This is in no way a negative – in fact, repetition is a key part of the experience. Every venue, every street and every corner has a story from a previous year. These stories, instead of dying or being forgotten, flourish from one year to the next to the point that they have almost become a form of mythology.
You see that boat? Naked Dave backflipped off that into the water museum.
Do you remember the giant pizza museum in Pula? We went last year, but they had stopped making giant pizzas. Now they just make regular sized ones, so Connor ordered two, and one of them was covered in lemons.
Did you hear about those English guys who crashed one of the golf buggies and tried to bury the windshield in a hole they dug with their bare hands to avoid a fine? What the fuck were they thinking?
During my eighth visit to Fažana – and this incredible film festival – it dawned on me that I was one of only two people in attendance, who were also present at that breakfast back in 2016. But yet, incredibly, through nothing but oral tradition, the gnocchi museum lives on, even though the restaurant stopped selling gnocchi about six years ago. This year, it had already closed for the season before the festival even began. But as luck would have it, I had a photo exhibition right outside.
“Where is it?”, I was asked multiple times. “Just outside the gnocchi muesum”, I would reply, which would be met with a knowing nod. Not once was I asked for more detailed directions.
Maité Steenhoudt, fakie disaster tailgrab, Kasarna.The younger Swedish crew misheard Donnie as Tony and called him that for the first few days of the festival, which is entirely unfunny unless you were there, I suppose. Anyway, here’s Tony O’Donnell doing a backside smith grind at the Hidrobaza skatepark.Donnie quite possibly took years off his life sprucing up Kasarna with his art. Every day he was painting at 8am and getting home after midnight. As well as looking amazing, the dedication and patience required was a feat in itself. Bravo, mate.Josefine Brown, layback frontside rock, Fazana.Eliott Toiminen, one foot, Hidrobaza.Alex Elfving, kickflip, Hidrobaza.Matteo Vandeputte, frontside tree ride using the new extension at the DIY.Irene Schweizer being treated to a discordant rendition of Happy Birthday – as you can see, she was thrilled.Irene and her gang presenting her wonderful Super 8 short film, Falling Out Of Summer.Donnie giving a speech about his mural.Delta!After screening her film the previous night, Irene Schweizer was straight back at it the next morning, shooting a new project with her crew.Some took more extreme action than others to avoid the €1 beer inflation.Boris Lalić reading Made in Chernobyl, a humorous and touching short story about growing up as a skateboarder with a breakdancing mother in Chernobyl.A brief glitch in the matrix.Nikola Racan introducing About Us by Turtle Productions out of Vienna.Mash Life’s Wildflower video was a real treat, not least for me and my oldest friend Ghostman, who happened to be sitting next to me when the spot where we met 20 years ago popped up on the screen.Vladimir OG Zoe Miloš’ epic ZO3001 exhibition in Vodnjan.Tim Smith’s photo exhibition in Vodnjan.Hollis Hampton Jones at sea, reading from her new book Spinnings, published by Palomino.An Ideal Husband by yours truly, which was exhibited on the Fažana seafront, right outside the gnocchi museum.Tobias Ulbrich’s amazing analogue exhibition, En Route, at Kino Valli in Pula.Tom Critchley presenting his and Javier Varillas’ film, All Day & All Night, a quite surreal and extremely unlikely concoction of How To With John Wilson crossed with an Adam Curtis documentary and occasionally resembling Pontus Alv’s early skate videos. Thoroughly enjoyable. I’m not sure how, when or if this is being released, but don’t miss it if it is.KIX by Dávid Mikulán & Bálint Révész. Fuck me. I think that HBO has the rights to this one now, and I cannot recommend it highly enough if it ever pops up on your preferred streaming service. A very special and unique documentary, taking you on a 12-year journey with a family in Budapest, Hungary.Nobody is free until Palestine is free. The Resistance and Palestinian Existence panel discussion at Kino Valli gave everybody something significantly more important than “that was a dope kickflip” to think about.The Vladimir Dog Festival was absolutely popping off this year.I hope that scientists can one day find a way to bottle small amounts of Deo Katunga’s confidence and charisma and share it out evenly to the rest of us. As well as showing a film on the first night and also shutting down the Kasarna mini ramp every after party, Deo fearlessly delivered a standup set in a room full of frowning punks and drunk skateboarders at Rojc, and after about 10 minutes, had the entire room on his side.The only true way to work out the attendance of the festival is to see how unpleasantly cramped the boat ride to Brijuni gets. This year was the busiest I’ve seen.Tony O’Donnell admiring the water museum from the boat.The Yorkshire squad, taking a break from yelling “Yorkshire” at any possible opportunity to enjoy the boat ride to Brijuni.The infamous skimming stones museum on Brijuni. I have no idea why, but the stones along the entire coastline of Fažana are fat and round and utterly useless for skimming. Inexplicably, the stones on the beaches of Brijuni, only a few 100m away, are almost exclusively the ideal skimming shape. I think it was Luka Pinto who pitched the idea of going there on day one of the festival, collecting bags of “perfect skimmers”, and bringing them back to the mainland to sell. It’s a pretty fucking good idea.White with black stripes, or black with white stripes? Vote now.I really hope Federico made it back to Italy.Tom Pickard presenting his fantastic full-length, Debris, which will be released on this very same website in the near future.Western depiction of Jesus, or Al Hodgson in Debris? You decide.Curved Universe by Mike Mag.The crowd enjoying Jante – 8:33 by Fritte Söderström on Brijuni.Something silly always happens on the boat back to Fažana. This time, it was this guy having beer poured into his mouth from the upper deck.Nisse Ingemarsson and Barney Page.
