The symbolic connotations of shoes in Nika Autor's films

Nika Autor, a Slovenian visual artist, director, and photographer is a member of the Newsreel Front (Obzorniška Fronta). Her films delve into themes such as the migrant crisis, labor rights, and the politics of memory, while challenging the expressive possibilities of the film news format through stylistic experiments and interventions in the social field. This paper aims to explore the multifaceted symbolic connotations that Autor infuses into the motif of shoes while addressing the aforementioned issues, starting from the film Solidarity (2011), where footwear becomes the central visual symbol of the protest for workers' rights, all the way to the films created in 2022, focusing on illegal migration, where shoes become bear traces of arduous and uncertain movement, signifying both physical and spiritual displacement. The motif of shoes in Autor's movies is not treated as an isolated object of interest but rather as a mediator of meaning. The analysis of individual films (Postcards /2010/, Solidarity /2011/, In the Land of Bears /2011/, Newsreel 63 - The Train of Shadows /2017/, Newsreel 2021 - Here I Have a Picture /2022/, Newsreel 451 - Across the Water to Freedom /2022/), is complemented by intertextual and intermedial comparisons exploring the relationship between film and visual art. This approach provides a comprehensive insight into the subject of research and a clearer positioning within Nika Autor's artistic oeuvre, by drawing analogies with the use of the shoe motif to express related ideas by other film and visual artists.