Codelli is a feature-length docudrama about a little-known film project by Slovenian inventor Baron Anton Codelli. Together with filmmaker and adventurer Hans Schomburgk he filmed in Togo in 1914 the first live-action film in Africa, which possibly inspired James Rice Burroughs for his novel on Tarzan. In the company of three Codelli’s descendants and actor Primož Bezjak, we traced the fate of Codelli’s film, brought the remains from Togo and Berlin to Ljubljana and used the Green Screen technology to bring to life 15 live-action scenes based on 600 Codelli’s museum photographs.

Codelli

Ivan Cankar experienced many things only after he has written about them. In the film, this link between his writing and his private life is depicted by live-action and animated scenes that draw exclusively on the writer’s works and letters to his loved ones. For an entire decade, he lived with the Löffler family in Vienna, where he wrote most of his impressive oeuvre. First, he grew very close to the lady of the house, then to her adolescent daughter Steffi. Back in Ljubljana, he got involved with several girls there, an attentive lover of a cheerful nature, accessible and highly intelligent. His popular public lectures reveal him as a passionate social democrat.