The 34th World Animated Film Festival – Animafest Zagreb 2024, the most important Croatian film festival and one of the three leading animation festivals in the world, will begin with the opening ceremony in SC Cinema tonight at 8 p.m. This year, Animafest will attract 370 foreign guests to Zagreb, screen almost 350 films, and attract thousands of spectators and visitors to cinemas, exhibition spaces and other locations. At the official opening of Animafest 2024, representatives of the City of Zagreb, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, the embassies of several countries, the International Association of Animated Film ASIFA and other guests of honour announced their arrival, along with the festival guests who had already arrived in Zagreb. The Lifetime Achievement Award will be personally accepted by Phil Mulloy, the Best Animation School Award on behalf of the French institution La Poudrière will be accepted by the director of the school Annick Teninge, and the Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies will be presented to the German professor Ingo Petzke, while the ASIFA Student Award will be received by Nikolina Žabčić.

he opening ceremony is intended exclusively for protocol guests, but the film and exhibition programmes of the festival are already in full swing. Last weekend, films from the Programme for Children and Youth were shown in the city cultural centres in Travno and Maksimir. Today at 12:00 in Šira Gallery, a group exhibition of students and professors (Ana Nedeljković and Nikola Majdak Jr.) of the Faculty of Digital Arts of the Metropolitan University from Belgrade We (Don’t) Find It Funny will be officially opened, with a series of animations, drawings, sketches and interviews, with an emphasis on black humour and challenges of contemporary art education. The exhibition can be viewed every day from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

All other festival exhibitions, which will have their official opening later this week, can also be viewed already today – Behind the Scenes 6, a traditional exhibition of the works of authors represented in the Grand Competition Short Film, has been set up in the SC Gallery (11 a.m.-7 p.m.) and the Student Film Competition (34 authors submitted works in a wide range of paintings, sketches, drawings, graphics, cut-outs, parts of set design, models, studies, recording books, installations and multimedia), in the Kranjčar Gallery (11 a.m.-7 p.m.) don’t miss the exclusive exhibition The End of Innocence by Phil Mulloy with 30 drawings and previously unseen films, in the lobby of SC Cinema (10 a.m. - 10 p.m.) original comic book panels, sketches, studies and posters of the Berlin author Malte Stein are set up, entitled The Blue Dream Cycle. At Oto Reisinger House of Caricature (10 a.m.-10 p.m.), Bordo and Oto in Dialogue juxtaposes the works of the famous duo of Kerempuh cartoonists (64 works from the legacy of Borivoj Dovniković and the permanent exhibition of the newly opened museum). Finally, in the Gallery on the first floor of KIC (11 a.m.-10 p.m.) you can see more than 50 drawings by the renowned Split author and cartoonist Tisja Kljaković Braić, based on which the animated film Žarko, You Will Spoil the Child! by Veljko and Milivoj Popović from this year’s Grand Competition Short Film was created – a story about growing up in Split. Admission to all Animafest exhibition events is free.

Today at 4 p.m. in Kinoteka, on the occasion of the master’s 90th birthday and as part of the Focus on Czechia programme, a retrospective of Jan Švankmajer, the great stop-motion animation artist whose films Dimensions of Dialogue, Historia naturae, The Flat, Flora, Darkness, Light, Darkness, The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia and Don Juan have long been part of the animated film canon. At 6 p.m., also in Kinoteka, the theme programme of Animafest 2024 dedicated to humour begins. The first section is dedicated to slapstick, a potpourri of unavoidable classics of festival and animation history: The Cat Came Back (Cordell Barker), Augusta Makes Herself Beautiful (Czaba Varga), Log Jam: KJFG No.5 (Alexei Alexeev), At the End of the Earth (Konstantin Bronzit), The Killing of an Egg (Paul Driessen), Kama Sutra Rides Again (Bob Godfrey) and Tim Tom (Romain Segaud, Christel Pougeoise).

Today’s film programme also includes the Grand Competition Short Film 1, which is scheduled as part of the opening ceremony. Screening: the world premiere of the film Percebes by Animafest winners Laura Gonçalves and Alexandra Ramires about life and tourism in the Algarve region of Portugal, the world premiere of the film On Hold by Delia Hess, whose beautiful black and white drawings associatively lists the motifs of alienated urban everyday life and female desires, the world premiere of the film by the Popović brothers Žarko, You Will Spoil the Child!, a political-apocalyptic puppet satire by Eirini Vianelli Ready, an animated film reading of the text by Henri Michaux, Ryo Orikasa’s Miserable Miracle and the oil on glass life story of swimmer Alfredo Nakache Butterfly by Florence Miailha. The president of ASIFA Croatia, Kata Gugić, will talk to the authors of the films after the screening. The screening of the Grand Competition Short Film 1 for all Animafest visitors is scheduled for Thursday, June 6 at 6 p.m. at Kinoteka.