At this time of year, the weather can be changeable, but what remains constant, are the emotions that we feel in the cinema while watching artistic animations, non-mainstream feature and documentary productions and the work of professors and students from film schools from different parts of the world. The 31th edition of the Etiuda&Anima festival will open with the Polish premiere of the Latvian Oscar candidate, the animation Flow about a cat fighting the element of water, directed by Gints Zilbalodis. The central part of the festival programme includes three competition sections, with a total of almost 3,000 productions entered this year! The ETIUDA competition will include 27 best feature films and documentaries from film and art schools from around the world (they will compete for the Golden Dinosaur statuette, and the Special Golden Dinosaur will be awarded to the best film school of the festival), the international ANIMA competition will feature as many as 45 animations (the jury will award the Golden Jabberwocky to the best one, and the Special Golden Jabberwocky will go to the authors of the best student animated etude), while the ANIMA.PL competition will screen 38 pictures from Poland (in the competition for the Golden Viper). In the non-competition section, we will see the best Romanian animations selected at the Animest festival, female animations from the Visegrad countries and the latest animated feature films, including Kek pelikan (dir. László Csáki) and When Adam Changes (dir. Joël Vaudreuil). Etiuda&Anima also includes meetings with award-winning filmmakers: Peter Lord, the founder of the legendary Aardman studio (Wallace & Gromit or Shaun the Lamb), will conduct his masterclass, Oscar-nominated Czech animator Michaela Pavlátová will present a retrospective of films and pictures created by herself and her students, and Niki Lindroth von Bahr (she received the Crystal Award at the Annecy festival for The Burden; the film will be shown as part of the author’s retrospective) and Volker Schlecht (his latest film, The Waiting, was screened in Berlin and Cannes) will disclose the secrets of her work in the series Self-portraits of Animation Authors. Creative Lab E&A industry events will include workshops (e.g. on virtual reality with Iwona Pomianowska), seminars (on the role of artificial intelligence in film production with Grzegorz Wacławek) or a ‘talent market’ for students and graduates of art and film schools.
“Karnet” 10/2024
