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World Festival of Animated Film /
short and feature film edition 9 - 14 June 2015
World Festival of Animated Film / short and feature film edition 9 - 14 June 2015
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Animafest Tuesday: Interview With an Oscar Winner, Big Retrospectives and Hungarian Animation’s Female Authors
09/29/2020

At 8pm, straight from Hollywood, Animafest’s audience will be addressed by the Oscar winner Peter Ramsey, the director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse. Ramsey is the first African American Oscar winner for feature animation and in addition to Spider-Man, he directed Rise of the Guardians. The interview with Peter Ramsey is streamed via the following link: https://bit.ly/3jgz3FJ.

After yesterday’s opening ceremony of the 30th World Festival of Animated Film, Tuesday at Animafest Zagreb brings the first ‘workday’ filled with films and side events at all cinemas and galleries.

The SC Cinema projectors are on at 11am with the World Panorama 1. The World Panorama is a diverse show programme of original and innovative titles stretching the boundaries of the media and acquainting the viewers with global animation trends, styles and plots. Among 25 films from 20 countries, World Panorama 1 screen eight titles, including the new films by Reinhold Bidner, Adriaan Lokman, Yann Le Bot, Tae-woo Kim, Pieter Coudyzer and other filmmakers already known to Animafest’s audience.

At 1pm, the third part of the Focus on Hungary section follows, to many probably the favourite part of this important cinematic overview because it contains the first film in the popular Gustav serial, as well as many other treasures of Hungarian animation in a large historical arch from 1942 to 2016. Many outstanding pieces are included, such as the Oscar winning Fly by Ferenc Rófusz and the intriguing psychedelic Gobble Gobble by István Bányai.

Tuesday brings us two big and important retrospectives. At 3.30 at the SC Cinema we are watching 15 films directed by the Animafest Lifetime Achievement Award winner Georges Schwizgebel, of course with the author present to provide us an insight into his creative work. Admission to this screening is free of charge, but for epidemiological reasons for all the free screenings free tickets need to be picked up at the box office. Among the films Schwizgebel chose to rescreen in Zagreb are the classics like The Year of the Deer, A Man Without a Shadow, Play, Romance and Erlking. Particularly esteemed for his work in glass and foil painting technique, Schwizgebel find inspiration primarily in classic and modern painting, music, literature and mythology. Animafest’s audience will have a chance to witness it by visiting the exhibition Master of Poetic Visions at the Kranjčaar Gallery during the festival. The exhibition was open to the public yesterday and the official opening for guests of honour is scheduled for today at 6pm.

After the Student Film Competition 1 (5.30pm) and Grand Competition Short Film 2 (8pm), the day at the SC Cinema ends with a retrospective of Yoriko Mizushiri at 10pm. Yoriko Mizushiri (1984) is one of the most distinctive Japanese younger artists and a world-renowned animator, who has managed, with only a handful of films of a unique and special, idiosyncratic and recognisable aesthetics and poetics, to make an inevitable artistic impact on global animation trends, all the way from the USA to Croatia.

In the Student Film Competition 1, the ones to watch out for are A Portrait of a Woman by Natalia Durszewich, based on a poem by the Nobel Prize Winner Wisława Szymborska and expressionist paitning, the graduation American-Chinese film There Were Four of Us by Cassie Shao inspired by an unusual dream and grandfather’s death and SH_T HAPPENS from the famous FAMU in Prague about a responsible janitor, his frustrated wife and a drunk widowed deer.

Grand Competition Short Film 2 features audiovisual spectacles like a new experimental film by a young genius of ‘painted animation’ Shunsaku Hayashi Leaking Life and Opera by the Annecy winner and Oscar candidate Erick Oh, a dystopian fresco inspired by Bosch and Italian renaissance masters and video games. Grand Competition Short Film 2 also has a lot of humour, absurdist in Ivan Rabbiosi’s Iron Me, queer in Chintis Lundgren’s Toomas beneath the Valley of Wild Wolves, animanarchic, grotesque and transgressive, with a hint of revenge film and ecological subtext in Wood Child and the Hidden Forest Mother by Stephen Irwin and a documentary film about addiction to poker machines Bright Lights by Charby Ibrahim.

The ULUPUH Gallery today at 10am opens the exhibition Behind the Scenes 2 – a making-of group exhibition of works by authors selected for the Grand Competition. The 13 of them are presenting their paintings, drawings, sketches, prints, collages, puppets, set parts, installations and video games, which makes this animation presentation in a gallery context also representative in terms far beyond national boundaries.

The &TD Theatre today at 10am continues with work in a hybrid online/offline form with the seventh international contemporary animation symposium Animation Scanner. The morning panel focuses on animation as a means of tackling the challenges of contemporary world, focusing on the issues of the apocalypse, pandemic, social panic and chaos, mass protests etc. At 4pm a video link invited lecture Did Animation Stop Being Funny? is scheduled by the winner of the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies Chris Robinson. Admission to Animafest Scanner is also free, with previously picked up tickets at the box office.

The &TD programme continues with a film afternoon at 4.30pm. The Student Film Competition 3 features the German film The Beauty by Pascal Schelbli, a student category Oscar winner 2020, focusing on plastic waste ocean pollution; a rotoscopic allegorical psychotherapy session of minimal design Helfer by Anna Szöllősi; the vibrant I’m Not Feeling Very Well by Sunčana Brkulj, a macabre, heavy metal depiction of singing birdlike skeletons to the riffs of the eponymous song by the Crawander band; an unusual Russian machinima Naked by Kirill Khachaturov about a man going through solid matter; Ido Hartmann’s eye candy The Shadow of the Sun about a man choosing a nomadic hermit lifestyle.

Grand Competition 6 (6.30pm) follows, with titles such as: Shoko Hara’s Just a Guy, a Claymation with archive film and collage elements about three women in a relationship with the serial killer Richard Ramirez; another machinima How to Disappear, a film essay on the nature of war video games, screened at Berlinale; Drive by the Hollywood master of CGI Pedro Casavecchia, showing the making of a psychopath in isolated spatial and temporal stretches; The Closing Door by Lucija Mrzljak, a video for the namesake song by the Irish singer songwriter, Oscar and Grammy winner Glen Hansard.

At 8pm, straight from Hollywood, Animafest’s audience will be addressed by the Oscar winner Peter Ramsey, the director of Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse. Ramsey is the first African American Oscar winner for feature animation and in addition to Spider-Man, he directed Rise of the Guardians. The interview with Peter Ramsey is streamed via the following link: https://bit.ly/3jgz3FJ. This talk has been rescheduled for 8pm and the announced Focus on Hungary 1 with an overview of contemporary women’s animation cinema takes place at 10pm at the &TD.

Tonight at 10.30pm at the &TD café, celebrating the 60th birthday of the Annecy festival, the programme ends with a late night special featuring 15 quirky, funny, politically incorrect, carnal, violent, shocking, evil, weird, dark and kinky films, mainly by acclaimed younger generation filmmakers like Sean Buckelew, Atsushi Wada, Peter Millard, Barbara Rupik etc.