Anja Medved is a director and screenwriter, renowned and multi-award-winning for her work as an author of documentary films, videos, and theatrical performances.
Anja Medved is an author of documentaries, videos, and theatrical performances. She studied Theatre and Radio Directing at AGRFT in Ljubljana. In her thesis, she focused on comparing the poetics of Anton Chekhov and John Cage. After graduating, she worked on creating videos and performances with the artistic collective Microinternational in Los Angeles. Upon her return to Slovenia, she worked on stage structures at Projekt Atol and collaborated on theatrical directing at Drama, Slovenian Youth Theatre, and Primorska Drama Theatre.
In 1997, she directed the intermedia performance 'Noč' (Night), based on Michelangelo Antonioni's film of the same name. Her first solo exhibition of the video 'Frequenze Notturne' was held in 2000 at the Kapelica Gallery in Ljubljana. She has directed over 25 documentary works, most of which explore personal and collective memories of the border area.
Since 2007, she has been leading a project to collect cross-border memories between Gorizia and Nova Gorica. Most of her films have been produced in collaboration with Nadja Velušček within the cross-border organization Kinoatelje, of which she was an author and project manager from 1996 to 2016.
For over twenty years, she has been collaborating with various cultural, research, and educational organizations, as well as artists from both sides of the border, contributing to the creation of a common cross-border cultural space in the Goriška region. She is the co-founder of KINOkašča / CINEMattic Institute, a film production and memory preservation institute based in Šmihel, near Nova Gorica.
Her career is marked by numerous awards and recognitions. One of the most significant is the Big Fiš, awarded to her documentary 'View Through the Iron Curtain' at the International Independent Film Festival FISCH in Tolmin in 2010. In 2008, she was awarded the Erasmus EuroMedia Seal and Medal in Vienna for her project on memory collection (EU-foria).
In 2011, she received the Scabiosa Trenta Award for Best Film at the Alpi Giulie Cinema Festival for her documentary 'Timeless River'. The film was also awarded at the EtnoFilmFest in Rovigo. In 2012, she and Nadja Velušček were awarded the France Bevk Award for their work in the documentary genre and cross-border cooperation. The prize is given by the municipality of Nova Gorica for outstanding achievements in culture. In the same year, they were also awarded another prize for outstanding cultural achievements in Cividale del Friuli, Italy.
In 2021, a retrospective of five of her films was presented at the Maxxi Gallery in Rome as part of the exhibition 'Bigger than Myself – Heroic Voices from the Former Yugoslavia'.
