The public first met Mitja Okorn in 2004 with his low-budget film ‘Tu pa tam’ (Here And There), which he made as a teenager. It was shown as a pre-premiere at the Liffe International Film Festival in Ljubljana, and later greeted with enthusiasm at international film festivals in Sunderland, Torun, Bradford, Pecs and Dundee. The feature became the most watched Slovenian film in 2005, for which it received the prestigious Golden Roll award.

Among other things, Mitja attended Berlinale Talent Campus twice, and wrote scripts for and directed more than 30 appealing music videos. He approaches each project in the same way - with the maximum effort. “For me, each project is like losing innocence again. I feel the same fear. I invest the same amount of energy and my whole heart.” He does not care about money; he cares about good stories and excellent performances. “When I undertake a project, I think about it every day. I also share it with all people close to me.” He shares it to the extent that they ask him to change the subject. They keep asking him, “Don’t you even know how to relax?” Mitja responds that film is his great love and he cannot simply switch off. “When you share your work with others, you find out what a project lacks.”

In 2007, he was ranked among ten European nominees for the Young Film Entrepreneur of the Year prize awarded by the British Council. Two years later, the international film journal Screen International placed him among the European directors who look set to achieve international recognition. In the article, noted British producer Sir Duncan Kenworty compared him to the director of ‘Trainspotting’, the Scot Danny Boyle, whose film ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ collected over eighty international film awards.

The self-taught director, who hoped in vain to receive the attention of the guardians of Slovenia’s production financing, inspired greater trust abroad. Since at home he had encountered more obstruction than motivation, he moved to Poland. He says he is not split between the two countries. “In Poland, I live as a resident of Poland, and I like to come back to Slovenia as a tourist”. In 2007, the Polish television station TVN invited him to direct on the first season of the television series ‘39 and a Half’. Each Tuesday, the series was watched by around 5 million Poles; so he was asked again in the following year to direct the entire second season, which again saw a record share of viewers. Mitja was also invited to work with a fresh and then still unknown band called Afromental, who became the most popular band in Poland that year because of this series. Mitja also shot two music videos for them. In addition to winning many prizes, one of the videos, ‘Rock & Rollin’ Love’, also received over 3 million views on Youtube. Since he had proven himself by directing the TV series, TVN entrusted him with a two million euro film, ‘Letters to St. Nicholas’. He more than justified their trust.

He is a dictator, a tyrant, according to the people who have worked with him. His impulsiveness originates from perfectionism, he says. He cannot stand mediocrity and incompetence. “I am hard on myself and on the people around me.” He tries to get the best out of people, which is why he is surrounded by people like him, who are not satisfied with being average. As he says, he is hard on everything he does. “I do not care whether the people I’m working with dislike me in the short term.” When he finally makes a high-quality product and, above all, a successful product, they forget all the difficult moments and simply come to love him.

Music has been his lifelong companion. As he says, it is his first love. He found an even greater love - film - when he was skating on the streets of Kranj as a teenager and one day decided that the skating stunts should be immortalised. For the first time in his life, he got his hands on a camera and started to film. It was love at first touch. When the material was being edited and he added music, his first love, to the images, he created a perfect ‘life combination’, as he puts it. “Since then, I have known what I want. I began to live my dreams.”

According to Mitja, everyone in the world is a film critic and director at the same time. “Maybe people do not know how to say what bothers them in a film, but they do react to it. This helps good directors to recognise what works in a film and what should be corrected.” Primarily, he makes films for himself. Positive audience reactions are like a drug to him. “Again and again, I feel orgasmic when people laugh and cry while watching my film. There is no better feeling than when your film touches someone emotionally.”

He jokes that last year he wrote to Father Christmas asking him to grant his wish to make ‘Letters to St. Nicholas’ without major problems and to get people to accept him as one of their own. He also wished for the film to find its public and, above all, make him proud. “This wish came true to a greater extent than I expected. The film became a great hit both in Poland and Slovenia. Obviously, from the next Christmas on, Kevin will not be ‘home alone’ again, and if he is, he will definitely watch ‘Letters to St. Nicholas’. “This year, all I want from Santa is health.”

Thanks to his great success, people in Poland are sending him good scripts, but he wants to move on. Where to? He wants good stories to touch as many people as possible all over the world. And the shortest way to achieve this is by making English language films.

I believe he will write to Santa again. Hush. The wish? “Hollywood, obviously,” laughs Mitja when we are ending our conversation. It is probably not just a lucky coincidence that almost at the same moment, when day was turning into night, tiny snowflakes began to fall.

The public first met Mitja Okorn in 2004 with his low-budget film ‘Tu pa tam’ (Here And There), which he made as a teenager. It was shown as a pre-premiere at the Liffe International Film Festival in Ljubljana, and later greeted with enthusiasm at international film festivals in Sunderland, Torun, Bradford, Pecs and Dundee.

The feature became the most watched Slovenian film in 2005.

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