Janez Kovič to receive 2026 Milka and Metod Badjura Lifetime Achievement Award
The 2026 Milka and Metod Badjura Lifetime Achievement Award, presented at the Festival of Slovenian Film Portorož, goes to Janez (Jani) Kovič, a production designer and producer who has left a profound mark on Slovenian cinema in more than forty years of his creative endeavours.
Janez Kovič’s extensive body of work includes more than 70 film and television projects. He began his career as a production designer in the early 1980s, when Slovenian cinema was still part of Yugoslav cinema. From his very first feature-length project, Displaced Person by Marjan Ciglič, he has stood out for his unique sense of cinematic space. For Wasteland, Kovič received the Golden Arena at the Pula Film Festival in 1982. In 1990, he won his second Golden Arena for his production design in To the Limit and Beyond. He is a three-time winner of the Metod Badjura Award for production design: for What a Sun (1984), The Felons (1987), and The Jailers (1991). This makes him one of the most awarded production designers in the history of Slovenian cinema.
Alongside his work as a production designer, Kovič built his career as a producer. In 1985, he co-founded Studio 37, one of the first organisational bodies for independent film production in Yugoslavia; in 1994, he founded Studio Arkadena, a production company that became a vital player in the Slovenian and regional film landscape.
Studio Arkadena worked on projects that have achieved international recognition and acclaim. The film (A)Torsion, directed by Stefan Arsenijević, won the Golden Bear for Best Short Film at the 2003 Berlinale, earned an Oscar nomination in the Best Short Film category, and won the European Film Award. In 2000, Srdjan Vuletić’s Hop, Skip & Jump also won an award at the Berlinale and several other international festivals. A special chapter in Janez Kovič’s body of work includes three architectural films about Jože Plečnik, created between 1991 and 1993 and awarded at the Barcelona International Film Festival.
The combination of production design and production is what makes Janez Kovič a truly remarkable film professional. As emphasised by this year’s judges, he is both “a producer who understands the cinematic space down to its smallest visual detail, and a production designer who knows what it takes to bring a project to life in its entirety”. This creative synthesis makes him one of the few personalities in the Slovenian and broader regional film scene who have made such a complete contribution to cinema in both creative and production terms.