Animafest Zagreb has announced the selected films for its Grand Competition – Short Film section, which guarantees Oscar qualification to its Grand Prix winner. This year, the jury will choose form among 35 films representing 23 countries of production, including three local Croatian works. Seven films will celebrate their world premiere at Animafest, three will have an international premiere, and all 35 will be screened in Croatia for the first time.
Daniel Šuljić, Martina Meštrović and Ivan Slipčević formed the selection committee that accepted less than 4% of the submitted works. The chosen films generally trend to a “return to the pencil and graphism” and vibrant colors, particularly rendered in oil and acrylic paints, and the hybridization of 2D and 3D techniques. Thematically, the films touch on cultural memory, mythology, psychology, the environment, war and women’s experiences.
Centered on an adult woman still living in the family home, 27 by Flóra Anna Buda is strung together with depictions of sexual fantasies, clubbing, economic barriers and frustration. The film won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, the Crystal in Annecy and was nominated for the European Film Award. Daria Kashcheeva’s Electra, a technically ambitious hybrid of stop-animated (pixilation and puppets) film and live-action segments, unfolds as a woman auto-dissects memories of her 10th birthday with blend of psychotherapy and performance. Screened in Cannes and Annecy, and awarded in Ottawa and Toronto, Electra is a contemporary reinterpretation of the ancient myth and a study of female trauma and identity.
Mermaids and Rhinos (Animafest 2018) director Viktória Traub returns to the Grand Competition with Shoes and Hooves, in which she again combines mythological/fairytale inspirations and a female perspective: A centaur working in a beauty salon longs for the feet that would allow her to wear shoes. Having a romance with a rich crocodile shoemaker, she searches for self-acceptance in a suppressive, conformist world of animal-human hybrids. Combining ink and watercolor, the Colombian film The Bitch by Carla Melo Gampert narrates the experiences of another hybrid: a bird-girl who ‘flies away from home’, a sexually frustrated protective mother and a pet dog in order to experience carnal pleasures and disappointments herself.
Finnish director Elli Vuorinen, in her fourth Animafest film Flower Show, connects floriculture and the generationally differentiated 19th century female gender roles in a defamiliarizing, disjointed and metaphorical way. Korean filmmaker Yumi Joung, winner of Animafest in 2014, crafted Circle in her distinctive minimalist style; a little girl’s sidewalk drawing traps passersby who feel compelled to respect its arbitrary borders. Out of Slovenia & Croatia (Finta Film, Adriatic Animation), Zarja Menart’s Three Birds combines collage and oil paint animation to create the umbrous folktale world of its heroine, who has an unusual relationship with her bird-faced grandmother.
Italian animation veteran Gianluigi Toccafondo, whose process incorporates photographic prints and paint, creates a metamorphic seascape of colors as life under the waves devours each other in La voix des sirènes; the film blends themes of mythology and motherhood, as well as anti-colonialist and ecological concerns. Femininity, sisterhood and motherhood are also explored in South Korean director Inju Park’s Reborn with You , an eye-catching piece making its world premiere in Zagreb. With unpretentious black and white drawing, Delia Hess’s On Hold offers a surreal vignette on the absurdity of urban life and female alienation as a woman waits on the telephone line; another Animafest world premiere. In the puppet film Falling for Greta, Gustavo Arteaga creatively and wittily visualizes an urban professional falling in love with an attractive plumber.
Nicolas Keppens’s third film Beautiful Men also uses puppets to recount the experiences of three brothers in Istanbul awaiting a hair transplant. Problems of communication, masculinity burdened with insecurity and loneliness, and medical tourism carry through a deft cringe-comedy. Francis Canitrot’s humorous and lively Peeping Mom, about the inappropriate relationship of a horny old woman towards the son who takes care of her, points to the far-reaching consequences of excessive parental involvement in their children’s intimate lives with an effective hybrid of stop-motion and 3D. As an answer to the metaphysical doubts of masculinity, Ivan Li offers Drizzle in Johnson — a 3D pastiche of cyberpunk, psychedelia, grotesque humor, body horror and violence.
Japanese animator Ryo Orikasa returns to Animafest (The Datum Point, Golden Zagreb Award 2016) with Miserable Miracle, inspired by the work of the same name by the poet and painter Henri Michaux. The OIAF winner is a hand-drawn (pencil, ink, paint) work, a partly abstract and partly figurative representation of sentences that take on different forms through the soliloquy of a mescaline addict. Nina Gantz’s puppet meta-film Wander to Wonder is a ‘behind the camera’ look at a typical live-action/ animated children’s series of the 1980s, after the death of the creator leaves miniature actors stranded in an abandoned home studio. Wander to Wonder premiered in Venice and was nominated for the European Film Award.
The record holder among Animafest winners, Georges Schwizgebel breathes life into two painting canvases, Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863) and Félix Vallotton’s White and Black (1913), in the film From One Painting… to Another through acrylic painting on cels. Catherine Buffat and Jean-Luc Gréco, a couple who made their debut at Animafest in 2016, return with the paper cutout piece A Very Twisted Tale, about sibling bullying and an attempt at revenge. Sundance selectino Matta and Matto centers on a surreal hotel where deep desires for touch are manifested for the price of a finger. Swiss directors Bianca Caderas and Kerstin Zemp explore issues intimacy, psychology and the need for power.
After presenting her feature-length film The Crossing (Animafest 2022), Florence Miailhe returns with a new work made with oil painting on glass and canvas, Butterfly, about French-Jewish swimmer Alfred Nakache. A Berlinale award winner, the short traces the protagonist’s childhood, Olympic simming career and family life, through WWII, Auschwitz and family tragedy, to the post-war Olympics, work with young people and old age burdened by memories. Inspired by disjointed impressions of his own childhood, Tomek Popakul and co-director Kasumi Ozeki create a black-and-white, magical realist vision of life an island fishing village for their Ottawa prize-winning Zima. An allegory of impossible or lost love, the South Korean film In the Clouds from Seok-ho Shin pairs whimsy and cartoonish design in its tale of yet another unhappy contemporary couple.
The latest work by Veljko and Milivoj Popović is also dedicated to memory: Tisja Kljaković Braić’s reflection on her childhood in Split in the 1980s. Žarko, You Will Spoil the Child! is a partial adaptation of her book U malu je uša đava, and she also did character drawings and backgrounds of the film produced by Prime Render Studio, Bagan Films and 3D2D Animatori (an Animafest world premiere). Klaus Hoefs ventures into his own memories in the film Uncles and I (another world premiere), a sketchy pencil rendering of rural summer with digital augmentation. Osman Cerfon on the other hand, offers a witty picture of childhood in Aaaah!, shown at Berlinale and Clermont-Ferrand.
The Chilean film Notebook of Names is a stop-animated and 2D memorial for 51 minors who disappeared in the early days of Pinochet’s dictatorship, from Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña (The Wolf House, The Andes, The Bones). Depicting the rotting and rusting of water damaged photo albums, Nicolas Brault’s Entropic Memory, an experimental film created by combining traditional and stop motion animation of stereoscopic macro photographs (S3D). Moïa Jobin-Paré’s Families Albums layers drawings, 2D animation, film scratching and photographs in its exploration of the fragmentary nature of memory; another OIAF award winner.
Animafest 2022 winner Laura Gonçalves (The Garbage Man) returns to the festival with the world premiere of Percebes, created in collaboration with Alexandra Ramires (Tie, Animafest 2020) and Portuguese studio BAP. Through a species of unusual-looking shells that inhabit the waters of the Algarve, Percebes comments on the consequences of tourism on communities. The Miracle by Nienke Deutz is also about tourism, centered on a middle-aged, childless woman staying in a resort full of families, rendered with cut-out characters on stop-motion sets.
After three years in a row (2020–2022) in the Student Film Competition, Sunčana Brkulj makes her debut in Grand Competition with Butterfly (Adriatic Animation, Late Love Production). A vivid combination of claymation and 2D depicts a community of garden creatures whose flow of life is stoppered when a butterfly gets stuck in their water fountain. In 2018, Parisian animator Alice Saey played Animafest with the music video Mark Lotterman – “Happy” and in 2020 with Careful for Jo Goes Hunting. This year, Saey debuts Flatastic, a dystopian vision of ambitious manta rays plotting rebellion against overcrowded, plastic-choked human civilization
Inspired by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Stuttgart-based filmmaker Irina Rubina (also known for her music videos) premieres Contradiction of Emptiness, reflecting on her native Russian and adopted German language with the now relatively rare pinscreen technique. The Route by Iranian director Babak Beigi, another world premiere, puts viewers in the shoes of a truck driver who travels the same road for most of his life, transporting prisoners to massacre site and trying to muffle the sounds of shooting with loud music. Finally, the Greek-Belgian puppet film Ready by Eirini Vianelli, who is also building a theater career in addition to animated filmmaking, visits the Greek Parliament where employees are dying of boredom, absurdity and senselessness in anticipation of the apocalypse — a political satire which suddenly turns into a catchy musical.
Animafest Zagreb will be held June 3-8. More information and ticketing are available at animafest.hr.
