Wednesday at Animafest 2026
Contemporary Slovenes – Revolutionary Dilemmas – Jazz With Classical Characters
Smrt ne postoji / Death Does Not Exist (Félix Dufour-Laperrière)
Animafest 2026 has arrived at the centre of the festival week, and in the mornings at Kinoteka, Films for Children continue to dominate. The first segment of their competition (ages 3-6) will be shown again this morning from 9:30 am with guest appearances by Adrián Jaffé (First Flight) and Vjekoslav Živković and Davey Moore (Seed), this time under the watchful eye of the children’s jury, which will also accompany the Youth Film Competition (15+) at 11:30 am and the Children’s Film Competition 3 (11-14) at 2 pm. At 4 pm, Kinoteka will host a new segment of Focus on Slovenia dedicated to the contemporary scene, which will be discussed by Špela Čadež (Nighthawk and Steakhouse), Lea Vučko and Damir Grbanović (The Legend of Goldhorn), Zarja Menart (Three Birds), Miha Reja (Kurent) and Anja Resman (Beyond the Face).
The Grand Competition Short Film 6 will then screen at 8 pm: Balconada by Iva Tokmakchieva – a blue-pink-white film with a classically beautiful, reduced cartoon aesthetic depicting a summer morning in an apartment complex; Tinnitus #3 by Italian veteran Michele Bernardi, which presents introspective, iconographically associative reflections on unpleasant thoughts and represents one of the outstanding cinematic experiences of this year’s Grand Competition; Once in the Body by María Cristina Pérez González – an elegy about a plump girl, her family and doubts that happily culminates in self-acceptance; A Man’s Heart by Chloë Danguy – an adaptation of Sarah Bernhardt’s book of the same name, which is a humorous reflection on annoying men; the international premiere of last year’s Animafest winner Sasha Svirsky’s new film Unidentified Nonflying Objects (UNO); Strange Teen Spirit by Frank Ternier about a young man and activist graffiti artists caught between longing and fear in a fragmented world at sunset; Autokar by Sylwija Szkiladz about a girl’s journey by bus in the 1990s, i.e., about the emigrant experience told from a fairy-tale child’s perspective. The 8 pm feature slot tonight is reserved for the first Slovak feature puppet film Dukla (dir. Gejza Dezorz) about the rapprochement between a poor Roma musician and a German officer in the context of the eponymous battle from World War II.
The SC Cinema will start its work at 1 pm with World Panorama 1. The programme Time for the Masters (3:30 pm) will follow, dedicated to new films by established names that marked Animafest in the past. We will see new works by Bruno Collet, Miloš Tomić, Suresh Eriyat, Donato Sansone, Cordell Barker, Dennis Tupicoff, Georges Sifianos and Theodore Ushev, and Sifianos and Tomić (along with producer Miloš Ivanović) will personally present their films Waiting for the Barbarians and Wild. In the Student Film Competition 2 from 5:30 pm, Ruihan Yang (Goodbye Waves is a gentle seaside solo melodrama with a pregnant melancholic atmosphere and visual poetry that is rarely seen), Šimon Mészáros (Quantum Jump is a highly reflective and highly reflexive 3D film of intriguing spatiality), Jing Wang (Hand is halfway between a psychological horror and a dance film because it represents the movement of the female body in the drama of separation and questioning of identity), Matas Pakutinskas (director) and Patricija Pažus (graphic designer) (Little October is an alternative-future ‘all-red’ SF set in a surrealistic-grotesque, dystopian-satirical vision of the USSR), Tommaso Zerbi (Time Flies is a 3D metacinematic black humour miniature of a frenetic rhythm that deals with everything that can be done in the three and a half minutes of the film itself), Katrina Larner (director) and Lewis Shaw (composer) (Play Fight! is a punk depiction of a girls’ sleepover with a serious subtext of negative reactions to coming out and repressed aggression) and Clarence Fennessy (Oldies of the Coast is a humorous claymation and 3D miniature about senior nudists) will do the same. The world premiere in this section is Hasan Ali’s Lebanese The Boy’s Fish, about an orphan who wants to retrieve his favourite pet from the ruins – a gift from his late father.
At the SC Cinema, after the screening at 8 pm, the microphone will also be held by proven professionals, participants in the Grand Competition Short Film (3): Krešimir Pernek (director) and Nika Belc (animator) (Strive, produced by Zagreb Film, is the world premiere of an allegory on the negativist focus of modern man, consumed by addictions, consumerism and fear, presented through retro-futuristic dystopia, coloristic symbolism, striking character and background design, as well as with intense rhythm and sound), Conor Kehelly (A Pint of Bitter is a paradoxical humoresque with a witty depiction of alcoholic ‘logic’ that explodes into an unusual odyssey with the potential for deeper introspection), Elise Kruusel (Facade is also humorously intoned, an unusually frontal depiction of coexistence, personality and secrets of an apartment building) and Carlo Galbiati (Should Virtual Petz Die? is an experimental documentary which refers to computer software that during the 1990s created a dedicated following of users strongly connected to virtual pets).
The curtain will fall in the SC after the 10 pm screening of the wacky WTF OFF – 11 intense short films that, brought together by the aesthetic sense of Sébastien Sperer, explore the edges, cracks and tremors of the image, storytelling and the viewer himself.
The morning at the MM Centre is once again strictly professional, but Marta Magnuska’s lecture "The Road to (mis)Aligning Your Career" as part of the AFN Edu workshop-mentoring program at 11:30 am ‘threatens’ to attract general public as well. Such people, however, will surely flood this festival space at 4 pm to see the fifth segment of the theme programme Music in Animation titled ‘Experimental Music and Hypnotic Pictures’. The third, perhaps the most attractive segment of the same program, ‘Jazz’, awaits them at 8 pm with Tom and Jerry, Droopy and Pink Panther, as well as Nina Simone, George Pal, Norman McLaren and John Hubley. If they stay at the MM all afternoon awaiting jazz, at 6 pm they will also see World Panorama 2, featuring Paulina Ziolkowska (Tears) and Olivier Héraud (Carcassonne-Acapulco).
The MSU screens the candidates for the Grand Prix of the Grand Competition Feature Film – at 6 pm Matamortes, and then at 8 pm Death Does Not Exist by Quebec artist Félix Dufour-Laperrière – a film that follows the self-examination of revolutionary Hélène after a tragic action, using a rich artistic expression with a distinctive process of colour blending of characters and backgrounds. The plot is at the crossroads of reality and imagination – dreamlike-hypnotic, philosophical, pregnant with layered symbolism and organic animated metamorphoses, and it reads as a psychological-political allegory – a reflection on individualism and collectivism, the personal cost of activism, and life choices and contradictions in finding one’s own path between personal interests and different types of loyalties. Death Does Not Exist is certainly among the most visually appealing films to be seen at this year’s Animafest.
The 13th Animafest Scanner symposium continues and concludes today at KIC. From 9:30 am onwards, the topic of curating animation in the contexts of festivals, exhibitions and canonical formations, as well as music in animated film, will be discussed. Lectures will be given by Cécile Noesser, Ewa Ciszewska, Martina Tritthart, Paola Orlić, Edmund Jansons, Jens Meinrenken and Katarzyna Figat, and moderated by Holger Lang and Andrijana Ružić. From 5 pm, new publications dedicated to animated film will be presented in the same space: Čudesni svijet ŠAF-a by Jasminka Bijelić Ljubić, the storyboards of Croatian films Her Dress for the Final and Raft by Martina and Marko Meštrović and Matija Pisačić, as well as The Art of Writing Animation by Alizee Musson. Along with the authors, the books will be presented by Boško Picula and Nancy Denney-Phelps.
The exhibition ‘The Art of Joanna Quinn’ dedicated to the winner of the Animafest 2026 Lifetime Achievement Award will officially open at the Kranjčar Gallery today at 1 pm, in the presence of the author. At the Clinical Hospital Centre of the Sisters of Mercy, little patients, who will enjoy a selection of Animafest films as part of the international Film in the Hospital project today, will be visited by authors Vjekoslav Živković and Timon Leder, and producer Miljana Dragičević.
