Anifilm to Award Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly

This year’s Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to animator Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly. During his career spanning several decades, he worked on countless short films, series and feature films. Thanks to his superb animation skills, humour and kindness, he has become a sought-after colleague and a legend of domestic stop-motion animation.
Mensdorff-Pouilly began with cut-out animation but soon moved to puppet animation on which he’s been focusing ever since. His extensive filmography includes popular titles such as The Vanished World of Gloves, series Pat and Mat, Yaya and Paya, The Doings of the Hippopotamus Family and feature films Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, a Sailor from York, The Pied Piper, Jan Werich’s Fimfárum and One Night in One City. In addition to Jan Balej and Jiři Barta, Mensdorf-Pouilly worked for instance with Zdeněk Smetana, Ivan Renč, Stanislav Látal, Vlasta Pospíšilová, Michal Žabka and Katariina Lillqvist. He works in animation studio Animation People.
His style is characterised by precision and thoroughness he uses to approach puppet animation and animated objects in general. He follows in the best tradition of Czech animation without resisting modern techniques and experiments, animation happenings etc.
Anifilm will screen a selection of his animated shorts (one programme block for grown-ups and one for children) and two feature films. The festival will also hold a special puppet animation workshop led by Alfons Mensdorff-Pouilly himself. We will also screen one of his latest titles – experimental audiovisual project NOTHING MORE (dir. Vít Pancíř) in which he was responsible for stop-motion animation.