Exhibitions

When the production of The Tree by Lucie Sunková, which you can see in our international competition, was nearing its end, its authors considered preserving at least a portion of the film’s paintings. The Tree was made using a demanding technique of paint-on-glass animation using a multi-layered animation table. The authors decided to publish a book, but the pictures in the book cannot show sufficient depth. That’s why they eventually organized an exhibition. As the distance between individual animated image plans (glass tables) is tens of centimetres, and using them would only create a huge case that would be impossible to transport, the authors “squeezed” three to four image layers into special 10 cm backlit frames. They managed to backlight them with a milky white light evenly spread through the whole background. The result is a series of 10 paintings – stills from the film – the magic of which will come to light only when seen in person.

This exhibition will give festivalgoers a chance to take a peek into the world of beautiful film puppets from new Czech films. One part of the exhibition shows puppets and scenes from Czech Television’s recent bedtime story series Stories about Mum and Dad. Its director Kristina Dufková designed the puppets herself and gave them an original visual stylization.
The second part of the exhibition shows populated decorations and forest elf puppets from the new film Deep in Moss by Bára Valecká and Filip Pošivač, supplemented by two exhibits of magical puppets of water nymphs and mushrooms. The remarkable 26-minute film Deep in Moss follows the tradition of classical Czech puppet films by Jiří Trnka and Břetislav Pojar and makes the best out of a magical forest atmosphere. Both Stories about Mum and Dad and Deep in Moss are screening at this year’s Anifilm.

Václav Mergl is an artist of broad scope whom the public knows primarily as an animator who has won numerous world-class awards. His films Crabs (1976) and Homunculus (1984) have become legends in the field of animation. As Jan Kříž notes: “The work of Václav Mergl is characterized by a metaphysical irrationality with heavily existentialist and deeply psychologizing, romantic undertones.” This fitting sentence unequivocally describes his original work, which was formed from a surrealist perspective and by tendencies towards the informalism and comics of the 1960s. Mergl’s inventive overlaps and his combination of various media make him one of the most important representatives of Czech postmodernism, which began gaining ground in the last third of the 20th century.
Václav Mergl was born on August 24th, 1935, in Olomouc. From 1958 until 1964 he studied at the Film Graphics Studios of the Academy of Arts, Architecture & Design in Prague. He is a prominent painter, graphic, screenwriter, animator and director. He lives in Prague where he works with the techniques and aesthetics of traditional Bonsai art.
The exhibition “Sequence of Stopped Time,” prepared for you by the Anifilm International Film Festival in cooperation with the Aleš South Bohemian Gallery, will present not only Mergl’s films but also selected collages, drawings, paintings and various objects.

Each day, from 12:00 to 13:00 is exhibition closed. The exhibition will run till June 20th.