What happens if you read together with a group of male inmates for two months? The short stories, coming from Slovenia to South America, are seemingly read in a Belgium prison, whereas as a matter of fact at the bottom of the sea. Can reading together bring about a different kind of a dialogue? What can we learn about ourselves by reading fiction with prisoners? How much of fiction do we need to survive? What does it mean to be imprisoned today? How much of ourselves can we recognize in the inmates’ conversations and personal reflections of the stories? And finally, what are we capable to imagine beyond our ‘personal prisons’?
Permeating Hearts is an experimental documentary, in which prisoners’ conversations and reflections, which are prompted by shared reading of fiction literature, are weaved into a new story that asks us to expand the limits of our perception and imagination, and see, think and feel with multiple eyes.
| Producer: |
Nosorogi |
| Director: |
Katarina Jazbec |
| Script: |
Katarina Jazbec |
| Camera: |
Katarina Jazbec, Matija Pekić, Nikos Kostopoulos |
| Editing: |
Jesse Immanuel Bom, Katarina Jazbec
|
| Director of photography: |
Katarina Jazbec |
| Others: |
Co-producer: De Rode Antraciet
Color correction: Matija Pekić
Book design: Thomas Karlberg Walskaar
Translation of Knežević's stories from Slovenian to Dutch: Roel Schuyt
Translation of reading sessions from Dutch to English: Hannah Kalverde
Translation of subtitles from Dutch to English : Jesse Immanuel Bom in Sem Janssen |
Katarina Jazbec, born in 1991 in Slovenia and currently based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, is a Slovenian visual artist and documentary maker. She explores various themes such as ethics, identity, freedom, social inequality, and illness from diverse perspectives and modes of understanding. Jazbec values initiating dialogue from a vulnerable standpoint, emphasizing trust, participation, intimacy, and the unexpected in her creative process. She employs a long-term Reading Cycle project to foster interpretive communities through shared reading of fiction literature, complemented by a series of film works.
Her choice of subjects is inherently political, aiming to shed light on pertinent issues. Jazbec is intrigued by the intricate relationship between fiction and reality and its societal and individual implications. She continuously examines this relationship as a subtext in her works, employing photography, film, dialogue, shared reading, and writing. Her recent projects have been exhibited at prominent venues such as the EYE Filmmuseum in the Netherlands, OrganVida Photo Festival in Croatia, and the International Festival of Contemporary Arts City of Women in Slovenia.
