SHORT FILMS AS AN INTEGRAL PART OF ZLÍN'S FESTIVAL
Animated film has always rightly belonged at Zlín's festival. To a large degree, Zlín's film studio contributed to the founding of the Czechoslovak tradition of animation and set trends in the world of cinema.
International Competition of Short Animated Films for Children
The international competition of short animated films for children is an integral part of the festival program. This year the festival's curators have selected from more than 500 films in order to create a collection of the best 64 for our audiences. To our great joy, France has numerous representatives; we've chosen to profile France for the 56th festival in Zlín.
The competition is a colorful exhibition of various genres, themes, emotions and techniques. German studio FILM BILDER has again brought some short witty anecdotes to Zlín (Wolf, Tiger, Head-up!); they presented the humorous animated film Lambs, by Gottfried Mentor, in Zlin in 2014. We'll be visiting a frosty realm inhabited by funny penguins three times this year, one of which tries to break the laws of nature and fly in the Bulgarian film Flight by Georgi Zahariev.
The French film Catch It! will certainly cause kids to laugh. It was shot by a team of students and, using 3D animation, they've brought us an adventure story about a group of cute meerkats who chase after their beloved and unique fruit.
After three years, a Belarusian winner of the Golden slipper, Tatiana Kublitskaya, is returning to compete with her latest work, Spring in Autumn. It's a moving story of love, courage and mysterious natural forces.
France will have some irons in the fire thanks to another French film, The One Who Tamed the Clouds, by director Nicolas Bianco-Levrin and Julie Rembauville, whose films take part almost regularly at Zlín's festival.
A non-European representative at the festival in Zlín will be represented by an acclaimed Australian animation by director Mikey Hill called The Orchestra, whose central idea is the ownership of a unique orchestra depicting our characters, moods and the lives we live. From three Iranian films, we'll mention the beautiful lullaby It's Time to Sleep, whose theme music audiences will never forget. Tim Burton's poetics have certainly inspired American director Pete Levin in his stop-motion animated ghost story I am Scared, which plays not only with words but also with the great imagination of some young children. An antiwar message is carried in the Mexican film The Trumpeter, a story about a courageous little musician who is able to resist a mindless military machine.
Some of the Czech representatives in the competition are, for example, the stop-motion The Christmas Ballad (Vánoční balada) directed by Michal Žabka based on the screenplay by Břetislav Pojar. After a year of successfully touring on the festival circuit, Veronika Zacharová (The Zoo Story) a student of Tomas Bata University in Zlin, is is returning to the Zlín competition with another film, The Bearytales, which offers an unusual and humorous insight into the world of these animals.
The best short animated film will be selected and the Golden Slipper will be awarded by a unique collaboration of film professionals and child jurors.
The festival will have the honor of welcoming delegations for selected films from Hungary, Romania, Russia, Norway, distant Hong Kong, and exotic Iran.
International Student Film Competition – Zlín Dog 2016
Few people realize that the Zlín Dog competition of student films has been part of ZLÍN FILM FESTIVAL for thirteen years! Since its inception, when it was created by students of the film school, it's been transformed into a regular competition category in which a three-member jury evaluates works from all over the world. It is a section that shows topics and an environment of controversial, politically-incorrect humor and bizarre actors. It's a section not entirely aimed at child audiences. The jurors don't have an easy task when evaluating the genre-varied documentary, live-acted and animated films. In the end they'll have to choose the top film of Zlín Dog, which will receive a prize of €1000.
This year's competition selection is pleasantly surprising due to the the high technical quality and production demands of the films. Students are not afraid to go back to old-school stop-motion animation techniques and create their own unusual stories. The balladic Brother Deer provides us a new perspective on the Slovak folk tale. Czech iron in the fire is the film First Snow by a student from a Pisek academy, Miroslava Ondříčka. This film about a small hedgehog proves that detailed work with puppets and a Hermina Tyrlova-esque maternal relationship to them always pays off.
The documentary films are a rich mix of portraits of every kind of tradition and culture. This is all contained in the Serbian documentary World Champion in which the local residents of a small town avidly compete for the prize for the hardest egg.
This year's selection of live-acted films is made up of a collage of movies with a slight touch of depression. We have tried to balance the themes about refugees and alienation between parents and children of films we have planned to screen with children's fantasy filmssuch as Imaginapped and the dark queer comedy (and the winner of the student section at Sundance) Peacock.
In general, it can be deduced that students have attempted a sensitive reflection of the situation they experience around them. A prevailing theme is alienation – the influence of social networks and the Internet on people, which causes antisocial behavior and an inability to communicate with one another face to face. We therefore look forward to seeing you at our cinemas in Zlín so that we can get together with the filmmakers to discuss whether their topics are serious enough or whether they are unnecessary worried.
