William Kentridge’s Circulus vitiosus exhibition will officially open in the Kranjčar Gallery at 1 p.m. with the presence of the author. The exhibition consists of four exhibits from the private collection Lah Contemporary: an anamorphic, optically elaborate AV installation whose title the artist derives from the Ghanaian proverb What will come (it has already come), a large-format drawing (213x147 cm) from a series for the Italian daily magazine Il Sole 24 Ore Domenica / Sunday, in which the author consciously evokes the appearance of the usual Sunday page of the daily press, the animated black and white film Shadow Procession from the early phase of Kentridge’s experimentation with collage animation and the etching from the series of “studies for the reserve army and heads” Casspirs Full of Love created in the last years of apartheid in South Africa.

In the SC Cinema, after World Panorama 2 (11 a.m.), ‘Kentridge’s Tuesday’ continues at 3:30 p.m. with a retrospective of the master’s films – nine works selected by Andrijana Ružić provide an overview of a career marked by the theme of apartheid, autobiographical inspirations, characters by Soh Eckstein (‘businessmen with raw faces’) and Felix Teitelbaum (a dreamy-melancholic artist), charcoal and collage, as well as dialogues with himself and variations of Méliès. From 5:30 p.m. in the SC, the Student Film Competition 1 will follow with a conversation with the authors: Wang Yu (Funeral at Nine), Zhen Li (fur), Bar Vaknine and Tamara Sharvit (The Building at 9 Etzel Street), Miriam Fox and Elena Valeri (Dead Silent), Maria Yanko (Vulvine Reine d’Extase), Mona Keil (Juice), Yu-Jin Oh and Bosol Kim (Unique Time). Dead Silent with effective ellipses, dissolving of solid object, and sound interjections mediates the consequences of a friend’s suicide on the psyche of young father Liam, Vulvine Reine d’Extase by a French group of authors is a fascinating film about a voluptuous queen who stops at nothing in order to once again meet the gifted Death she strongly craves, Funeral at Nine by a group of authors about the imagination of three protagonists who attend a gardener’s funeral, Unique Time is a full-blooded South Korean cyberpunk about a nominally female android who, due to an error in face generation, becomes interesting to a photographer in a creative crisis, and The Building at 9 Etzel St. is a depiction of the meeting of the tenants of an apartment building with a Palestinian construction worker – a poetic, gentle plea to break the vicious circle of history with the help of everyday humanity. At 8 p.m., Natko Stipaničev (The Following Season), Naomi van Niekerk (Box Cutters), Varya Yakovleva (Oneluv), Charlotte Waltert and Saskia von Virag (Greylands) are guests in Grand Competition Short Film 2. The Following Season, created with the help of AI, depicts the winter coastal metamorphoses in a painterly style based on the text "Du luxe et de l'impuissance" by the contemporary French playwright Jean-Luc Lagarce. Box Cutters is a sand-animated confession of a victim of violence from the streets of Johannesburg, inspired by Ronelda Kamfer’s song, and Oneluv is a highly syncretic depiction of rape in private space, violence in general, and a strong female and sleazy male principle that represents a complete fresco of the moral decay of society. The motifs of Meinrad Inglin, a Swiss writer of passatist and anti-modernist tendencies, are brought to life in Greylands’ glass painting technique. At 10 p.m., the last slot in the SC Cinema brings a retrospective of sci-fi films from 70 years of Zagreb film history: the opening speech will be given by Vinko Brešan, and you can see classics by Vukotić, Grgić and Marušić, as well as newer films by Kukić, Pisačić and Belić.

Tuesday is the first of three festival days at the Tuškanac cinema dedicated almost entirely to children and youth. From 9:30 a.m. until the afternoon, there are programmes from the Films for Children Competition and the Films for Youth Competition (3-6 years at 9:30, 7-10 years at 11, 11-14 years at 13, 15+ at 15) with interviews with the authors of the films. Guests are Vjekoslav Živković (WhoWho at the Birthday Party), Rika Nakayama (Under a Shooting Contrail), Olga Titova (Socks for the Star), Mirela Ivanković Bielen (The Journey), Tal Kantor (Yellow Light), Yegane Moghaddam (Our Uniform), Nikol Mazepina (Nightmare), Raffaella Delle Donne (counselor on the film The Soul’s Journey) and Bahram Javahery (Two Apples), and the interviews are hosted by Ivan Pavlović and Višnja Pentić Vukašinović. Selections from the Films for Children and Youth (3+) can be seen on Tuesday at the National University of Sesvete at 10 and 11 a.m., also with free admission.

Screenings at Tuškanac continue with the feature-length Polish-French sci-fi Chronopolis by Piotr Kamler (5:30 p.m.) from the science fiction theme programme. A non-verbal stop-motion spectacle of exceptional imagery achieved with complex materials and shadow, Chronopolis is a philosophical meditation on the nature of time accompanied by electronic music by Luca Ferrari. The day at Tuškanac ends equally spectacularly at 19:30 with the first screening of the animated adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s six stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Pierre Földes. The film of surrealistic oneiric, magical realist logic that combines visual literalism and symbolism takes place in Murakami’s favourite liminal spaces and shows urban alienation, existential anxiety and the banality of everyday life, but also humour, eros and the search for closeness. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman is prone to references to high and popular culture, and unfolds in the slow reading rhythm of a rainy Sunday afternoon with the acoustic accompaniment of smooth jazz. It is the most popular film of the Animafest early-bird ticket sales, so you should hurry to see it while there are still free cinema seats.

Scheduled for the Tuškanac Summer Stage, but moved to Tuškanac Cinema due to weather, Albert Vázquez’s Unicorn Wars will screen at 9:30 p.m., an explicit anti-war and environmentalist black humour film that finds the roots of evil both in militarism and the indoctrination of cultural and religious fascism, as well as in family pathology.

In the &TD Theatre, the tenth anniversary of Symposium for contemporary animation Animafest Scanner , begins at 9:30 a.m with a lecture, What Does ‘Animation’ Mean Now? by Suzanne Buchan, winner of the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies. Following are presentations on the need to redefine author’s animation (Mina Sablić Papajić), animatronics (Farzaneh Omidvarnia), animation in a virtual environment (Franziska Bruckner and Julian Salhofer), originality and authenticity of AI (Christopher Holliday), AI in working on a storyboard (António Manuel Dias Costa Valente) and modular, non-linear narrative structures (Charalambos Margaritis). The projectors at &TD are turned on at 5 p.m. for the Student Film Competition 3, from which we highlight: Homemaker (dir. Ciara Kerr), an ink-on-paper musical with a bit of stop-motion animation that thematises violence against women and sexual violence in the family through extraordinary symbolic transformations; Symbiosis (dir. Raz Merhav), an ambitious hybrid of claymation and 2D about the relationship between an African albino boy and a three-legged calf – a touching but at the same time allegorical story with mythological power; the sumptuous and dynamic caricatural misanthropic grotesque about youthful love Above the Clouds (dir. Vivien Hárshegyi); the humorous French gay miniature with beautiful colours and a comic appearance La Vita Nuova (dir. Arthur Sevestre). At 6:30 p.m., the Grand Competition Short Film 5 follows with titles such as: the Oscar-nominated The Flying Sailor by legendary Canadians Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, an artistic reinterpretation of an incredible real-life event from 1917; The Debutante by Elizabeth Hobbs, shortlisted for the same award, adaptation of a short story by surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and a feminist-avant-garde metaphor set in high society in 1934; the metafilm Chamber of Shadows (dir. Seyoung Ok) – a Korean stop-motion animations of photographs by media pioneer Eadweard Muybridge on transparent acrylic substrates; Pernille Kjaer’s poetic Spring about the awakening of nature, the country house and the body, rooted in the folklore of Jutland; honest, hilarious and touching autobiographical etudes by Ethan Barrett Rosemary AD (after Dad) about paternal dilemmas realised in the style of ‘children’s’ wax crayons; the black-humoured Brazilian horror La pursé (dir. Gabriel Nóbrega, Lucas René) and Joseph Pierce’s Scale, a rotoscoped adaptation of Will Self’s story, a hallucinatory work of unusual proportions, ellipses and non-linear storytelling about the artist's addiction experiences. At 8 p.m., slot 1 of the theme programme dedicated to SF brings new short films primarily entertained by technology, both AI and other ‘software’ – Sean Buckelew, Mitch McGlocklin, Angélica Restrepo and Robert Seidel are some of the author names in this programme. &TD closes its doors with a screening of the World Panorama at 10 p.m., with a conversation with Sofija Laszlovszky and Zsombor Benyovszky (Botanica Exotica), Lea Vučko and Damir Grbanović (Legend of Goldhorn), Olivier Croufer (Far Away Lands), Holly Summerson and Marija Wrangrasmussen (Living with It). Interviews are hosted by Nino Kovačić.

Michelle and Uri Kranot will hold this year’s first masterclass at the MM Centre at 3:30 p.m. Michelle and Uri will talk about the leading platform for the development and production of animated documentaries, Anidox lab, of which they are the founders and main instructors. Then, at the same place from 17:30, four new book presentations: catalogue of the exhibition From Imagination to Animation: Six Decades of Zagreb Film, a monograph on Aleksandar Marks (edited by Maja Cepetić Rogić), exhibition catalogue Waiting for Kentridge by Paola Bristot and comic album OHOHO. The books are presented by Nikica Gilić, and Paola Bristot is a guest.

AFN Edu, a program of mobility and international cooperation of animation students, organised by the network of the five most important festivals of Central and Eastern Europe, starts at KIC at 12:00.