Return to stop motion forcefully. This is the message of the Mostra Internacional de Cinema d'Animació de Catalunya (Animac), which is held in Lleida. Juan Pablo Zaramella, the Animation Master prize in this edition, attributes the boom in the old technique to the use of great directors such as Charlie Kaufman, Tim Burton, Guillermo del Toro or Wes Anderson and to the great connection with childhood games.
“It is having the world in miniature to create new worlds, to create stories. And that is one of the elements that connects children and adults. For the older ones, it refers a lot to when they were children”.
Some animators are also betting on introducing some things in 3D cut-out, with the sole purpose of reducing production time and costs to face the slowness of stop-motion, one of the oldest animation techniques. “There is some complicity between the viewer and the stop-motion. We are not trying to make you believe that this world exists 100%. The viewer assumes that he is looking at dolls and understands how they are animated precisely because of the old technique, ”says Zaramella.
Her feature film project, I'm Nina, a stop-motion feature about communication between people, where Nina is a rat girl who lives in a very gloomy world and suddenly finds herself in a world she didn't know, bright, colorful where rabbits live, and where it is rejected.
Four medium-length films and 277 shorts can be seen at this year's Animac, with a marked Latin accent, since, with the motto LatAm boom, this edition is dedicated to Latin American creativity. Animac has programmed up to four monographs such as Cicatrices, a selection of films on political repression.
Romanian filmmaker Anca Damian, who has received the honorary prize, presents The Island, a musical comedy about Robinson Crusoe, immigration and climate change. The film opens a festival that likes diversity in very different countries and sensibilities, not only from various countries, but from different strata and sensibilities. “One of our favorite formats is the short film, because it is the one that allows for the greatest risk, the greatest experimentation, the most possibilities of telling their own stories,” explains director Carolina López.
In ¿Dónde está Heleny?, Esther Vital from Navarra unearths the story of the missing teacher and theater director Heleny Guariba. Torture is presented in handcrafted characters sewn on sackcloth, in stop-motion. Rapes and aggressions, also in the film by the young Nicaraguan director Gloria Carrión, Hojas de K, based on the testimonies of ten women who participated in the protests in Nicaragua in 2018. She took the interviews in her suitcase to Canada, where she lives exiled. “Making films in these circumstances is like making impossible films, in an extreme situation. We are talking about a cinema, which according to authoritarianism should not exist, is absolutely disobedient ”, she affirms.
Salvation Has No Name, from director Joseph Wallace; Amarradas, by Carmen Córdoba, or Amok, by Balázs Turai, are some of the shorts in the official section.
The director of Animac, Carolina López, stresses that the festival is also construction. From Peru, the director Omar Rojas has presented his project Los Santos, on physical, psychological and sexual abuse by Sodalicio, a Christian association that recruited boys of which he was a victim.
“I believe –says Omar Rojas– that the film is my way of finally leaving the Sodalicio, because even when the complaints appeared, in 2015, although I was already an atheist, it was still difficult for me to accept that all the accusations that were made were real. to the founder or number two, to whom I prayed for a few years”.
Interdit aux chiens et aux Italiens, by French director Alain Ughetto, a stop-motion feature film, or An ostrich told me the world is fake and I think I believe it. ), directed by the Australian student Lachlan Pendragon, nominated for the Oscars, are other proposals for a festival that can also be seen through the Filmin platform from March 3 to 12.
