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Surviving Strategies In Animation: The Full Programme of the 7th Primanima

Surviving Strategies In Animation: The Full Programme of the 7th Primanima

Between 24 and 27 of October, the 7th Primanima World Festival of Animations will take place in Budaörs, where the focus is on young animation directors. During the four days of the festival visitors can watch shorts, as well as feature-length animations, and the programme will be completed by workshops, masterclasses, exhibitions and concerts. The little ones won’t be excluded either: children animation screenings will be organized all across Hungary and in Hungarian-speaking communities beyond its borders. For the 7th edition of Primanima the festival received more than 500 submissions from 26 countries and from which 14 first films, 26 graduation films and 21 student films were selected. Thus 61 short animation films and 32 children films are going to compete for the awards of Primanima.

The motto of this year’s festival could be Survive life with animation. The London Royal College of Arts alumna Diyala Muir was awarded in 2016 with the award for the Best Diploma Film for The Day After The Party, this year her first own film Blue Hands will be part of the competition; an animation about a young girl absorbed in social media, who tries to deal with her suppressed mourning. Martina Scarpelli also presents her first individual work. After her bizarre short Cosmoetico, at this festival she comes up with Egg, a surrealistic animation that gives an insight into the mind of those struggling with eating disorder, based on the director’s own experience. After the successful run of Oh mother! on the festival circuit Paulina Ziolkowska brings another student film to Primanima. Bless You!, which has been received honourable mention at this year’s Berlinale, is an abstract animation in vibrant colours, reflecting on grumpy and neurotic human interactions. Olivér Hegyi’s MOME diploma project, Take Me Please, presents life after breakup; the film has been screened in Annecy and Sarajevo.

In this year’s competition there will be several shorts qualified for Oscar nominations, such as a Belgian-Dutch production Bloeistraat 11, awarded in Annecy with the Crystal Prize, which presents with surprising sensibility the coming of age of two teenage girls. The Swiss animated documentary Intimacy gives an honest take of female sexuality through the statement of a porn actress. The Blissful Accidental Death, a digital stop-motion from Romania invites the viewer to a surreal journey to the beginning of the 20th century, the era of Romanian Dadaism. Also part of the shorts’ competition is the spectacular British-Italian stop-motion Inanimate, about an unexceptional girl’s life literally falling into pieces. The film was awarded the third prize at Cannes Festival’s Cinéfondation programme, which supports students’ films. Five Years After the War is a French animated documentary about a boy with an “ethnical burden”, born to a Jewish mother and an Iraqi father, trying to define himself in a world of constant political conflicts. Balázs Turai’s first individual work, a cheeky piece of social criticism, The Fall of Rome, will also be screened at Primanima. It presents a post-apocalyptic paradise, where the survivors of an atomic bomb huddle together. Tímea Varga’s diploma film Not Yet discusses the alarming questions faced by many single parents, using the perspective of an abandoned little boy.

View the Selected Films of the 7th Primanima festival

In the children’s programme besides many Hungarian films, English, French, German, Belgian, Polish, Russian and Czech animations for children are also represented. Among the Hungarian films, the adaptation of Veronika Marék’s tale, Kippkopp in the Grass will be screened, and the latest episode of the new animation series Castaways. The international animations to be presented at the festival are, among others, the Canadian-Croatian co-production Hedgehog’s Home, a stop-motion film awarded at several festivals, based on a well-known tale by Bosnian author Branco Ćopić about a steadfast little hedgehog, who defends its home against the beasts of the woods. The French film Flipped is a playful story about children and adults swapping roles.

Like every year the awards are selected by the international jury, this year the jury is consisting of Tomek Ducki, Hungarian-born animation director from Poland, Kreet Paljas from Estonia, programme director of Anilogue International Animation Festival, Budapest, and György Pálos film director and producer from Hungary. The children’s film competition is evaluated by Zoltán Balázs, the head of the Department of Art at the Partium Christian University in Oradea, Judit Czakó editor and Bálint Gelley animation director and producer at CUB Studio, Budapest. Beside the Grand Prix and category prizes at the festival to support young Hungarian creators there are special Hungarian awards, which take their names after renowned Hungarian artists of animation history (George Pal Award for the most promising Hungarian talent in animation; Gyula Macskássy Award for the most popular Hungarian animation; Tibor Csermák Award for the most popular Hungarian animation). This year there are two new awards, as well. A professional jury will evaluate the children's film competition, and the PrimAlter jury recruited from civilians will also bring a new perspective. The audience, the students’ jury, as well as the PrimaSound jury will also pick their favourite films.

However, the programme of the 7th Primanima festival is much more than just competition. Before its television release, all episodes of the recently finished series The Adventures of Candide will be publicly presented for the first time. The work promises to be a new cult film, so stay tuned! Also before the official premiere, the much expected action-thriller Ruben Brandt, Collector by Milorad Krstić will be showed in the presence of the creators. The programme will also include The Breadwinner, an Oscar-nominated animation from the noted Irish Cartoon Saloon, Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs, a vertiginous post-apocalyptic stop-motion, as well as a Hamlet-adaptation entitled The Rub by Péter Lichter and Bori Máté, first released at the Berlin Critics’ Week. For the first time in Hungary, Primanima brings to the viewers This Magnificent Cake!, a Belgian stop-motion film awarded with the grand prix at the Zagreb and Ottawa International Animation Festivals. The film narrates with astonishing wool puppets the colonization of Africa from a post-colonial perspective and is the work of Marc James Roels and Emma De Swaef. The CEE Animation Talents selection focuses on the works of animation creators, students and first-time directors from the Central and Eastern European region. The initiative of the CEE Animation Forum is to draw the attention of both of the professional audience and the general public to the up-and-coming talents in the region.

The film selection of the 7th Primanima is completed by workshops, exhibitions, masterclasses and concerts. Péter Lichter and Bori Máté will get the participants acquainted with the technique of experimental filmmaking using found footage materials, Bence Kránicz will teach the basics of thinking and talking about animation films in a film criticism workshop. Puppet animator Zsuzsa Szabó and sound designer József Iszlai will lead a workshop to explore the possibilities of making animations with a local specific. Tomek Ducki, who also works in the field of applied arts (as poster designer and music video director) presents through his own works the connection between animated and still images. The exhibition of the ceramic artist and comic book fan Neil Wolstenholme’s private collection will present rare works by Mœbius, Bill Sienkiewicz, Brian Bolland and Gilbert Shelton as well as  original drawings from Richard Piers Rayner’s Hellblazer.

The main venue of Primanima is, as always, the Jókai Mói Cultural Center and the Budaörs Animation Base and Creative Space (BABtér), which offers animation trainings and events during the whole year. It has also became a Primanima tradition to show the children’s competition films not only in Budaörs, but in the following cities in and outside of Hungary: Pécs, Sopron, Szekszárd, Csíkszereda, Kolozsvár, Nagyvárad, Sepsiszentgyörgy, Székelyudvarhely.

Festival's official trailer:

The 7th Primanima World Festival of Animations will take place between 24 and 27 of October 2018 in Budaörs.

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