Among the special programmes of this year’s Animafest, we present the Cartoon East project. Cartoon is an international non-profit organisation aiming to provide support to the European animation industry through different means: seminars for professionals, co-production forums for animated series and feature films and development of new methods of strengthening cooperation between professional animators worldwide.

In addition to that, Cartoon supports European animation through the only European short animated film award, Cartoon d’Or, granted to the best among the awarded partner festival entries. The winners include many renowned filmmakers, such as Nick Park, Sylvain Chomet, Jacques-Rémy Girerd, Mark Baker, Michaël Dudok de Wit, Abi Feijo, Virgil Widrich, Marc Craste, Joanna Quinn, Luis Cook and David O'Riley.

Cartoon East is a project including six festivals from this region: Animafest Zagreb (Croatia), Animateka Ljubljana (Slovenia), anim'est Bucarest (Romania), Balkanima Belgrade (Serbia), Banja Luka International Animation Film Festival (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and FestAnča Žilina (Slovakia). Each festival nominated one short film from its country. During the Animafest, the Grand and Student Competition juries will award one of the nominated films from the Cartoon d’Or selection of nominees.

Croatian is represented by My Way by Veljko Popović and Svjetlan Junaković. The Wall of Sighs by Dušan Kastelic and Igor Šinkovec represents Slovenia. Serbia sent its A Stray Cosmonaut by Marija Milanović-Lazarevski, while White Noise by Marius Pandela represents Romania. Viliam by Veronika Obertova comes from Slovakia and Wondermilk by Ivan Ramadan is the Bosnian and Herzegovinian representative.

The said films will be screened on Friday, 4 June, 5pm at the Europa cinema as a part of the Cartoon East programme.