A five-member selection committee has chosen animated shorts and videos for this year’s Anifilm competitions. The committee went through a record number of submissions and selected not only student and short animated films, but for the first time also music videos and non-narrative and boundary forms of animation into new competition categories. The festival has received over a thousand films from which, excluding feature films, about a hundred made it into the main competition categories.
The total amount of submitted films included a majority of dark and gloomy films, but also humorous and grotesque films were chosen. Among them is a new film by the Dutch trio Job, Joris & Marieke, the makers of last year’s hit Mute. The short film competition also includes new films by renowned filmmakers Bill Plympton, Konstantin Bronzit, Andreas Hykade, Don Hertzfled or the Pärn family. The Baltic countries were especially strong this year, apart from the mentioned famous duo from Estonia, the competition includes also new films by Priit Tender, Riho Unto and Latvian directors Edmunds Jansons and Vladimir Leschiov. Eighteen-minute-long French film Smart Monkey by the co-director of famous Persepolis, Vincent Parronaud, will be also looking to win the award.
Thanks to the success of last year’s showcase of Chinese independent animation, Anifilm has received many films from China as well. In the spirit of the aforementioned independent animation, the committee was pleasantly surprised by a student called Ding Shiwei, one of which (Goodbye Utopia) has a chance to succeed in the new category for non-narrative, experimental and boundary forms of animation. Another atypical Chinese film is Let’s Wait Together by Weiyu Wang.
New section – non-narrative animation
A rarity in our new category for non-narrative animations was for example a collective work Re-Cycling by ten renowned directors such as Regina Pessoa, Ülo Pikkov and Špela Čadež. Each of them received a mysterious object by mail and had to make a one-minute-film about it. Among selected films that prefer other qualities than narration an animation, we will also find the new film by the legend of Polish animation Jerzy Kucia called characteristically Fugue for Cello, Trumpet and Landscape.
Czech and Slovak representatives in the competition of short films
Czech and Slovak Republic will be represented by a 30-minute-long puppet film by Vojtěch Kiss The Anatomy of a Spider (Anatomie pavouka) and Nina by the Slovak duo Ové Pictures. Czech animators will also compete in the new category of music videos. Jakub Kouřil made a music video for the song Noe by Tomáš Klus and Noro Držiak directed the video for Hrob by Kafka Band.