Independent filmmaker Filip Robar Dorin, a revered innovator who fused feature and documentary films and provided a platform for the disenfranchised, has died, aged 84.

Many of his 30-plus documentary and feature films and 15 documentary portraits of Slovenian artists have received awards in Slovenia and abroad.

Robar Dorin studied philosophy and comparative literature in Ljubljana, and screen writing, directing, camera and film editing at Columbia College in Chicago, US.

After teaching at a private institute in Switzerland and at the Ljubljana Academy of Theatre, Radio, Film and Television, he founded one of the first independent production firms in the former Yugoslavia in the 1980s and served as the head of the Slovenian Film Fund between 1998 and 2002.

Robar Dorin won a number of awards for Veter v Mreži (The Windhunter, 1989) and enjoyed great acclaim for Opre Roma, a trilogy on a Roma village near Novo Mesto spanning three decades.

He received the Prešeren Prize, the top Slovenian accolade for the arts, in 2019, and was honoured with two top-level lifetime achievement awards; by the Slovenian Film Artists Association in 2010 and by the Directors' Guild of Slovenia in 2017.

"An artist who made film one of the highlights of Slovenian culture. A man who has dedicated his life to film," the Metod Badjura Lifetime Achievement Award jury wrote in 2010.

Robar Dorin, who has been described as an activist director, said in interview that "a film does not mean much unless it makes a change. It must be a driver of societal change".

A film should "literally shake up old soil to allow new plants to grow. New generations... are my biggest reward", he added.