23/06/2015 - The Slovakian multimedia festival offers a rich programme featuring a global panorama of animated films as well as a few unusual titles

The only Slovakian festival specialising in animated production will fling open its doors on 24 June for the eighth edition of Fest Anča. It will boast the latest animated features, including Signe Baumane’s “funny film about depression”, Rocks in My Pockets [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Signe Baumane
film profile], and Song of the Sea [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tomm Moore
film profile] by two-time Academy Award-nominated Irish illustrator and filmmaker Tomm Moore, who will also be a guest and jury member at the festival. 

This year, 33 short animated films of under 30 minutes’ duration were picked from the enormous total of 1,159 submissions hailing from 78 countries to compete for the Anča Award in the international competition. Moreover, entries made by students will qualify for the Anča Student Award, which will be handed out by the same jury. Another two awards will be given out in the international competition for animated music videos and the international competition for animated films for children; in the latter case, the winner will be chosen by a kids’ jury. One section is reserved solely for domestic titles that will compete for the Anča Slovak Award. Furthermore, selected short films and music videos that did not make it into the competitions will be screened as part of the World Panorama section.

The eighth edition of the festival shines the spotlight on Estonian animation, revisiting the important chapters in its history, starting with the experimental short The Adventures of Juku the Dog from 1931 and the first official Estonian animated film, Little Peter’s Dream by Elbert Tuganov (1958); the retrospective will then continue through the golden age in the 1980s, under the guidance of Tallinnfilm, into the present. The programmers have prepared a showcase of two animation studios – Nukufilm and Joonisfilm – and a retrospective of the work of Priit Pärn, who has won Lifetime Achievement Awards from the International Animated Film Association a total of five times.

Fest Anča offers a very rich programme: it will rummage through animated oddities and the strangest animated works (in the Anča in Wonderland sidebar), as well as showing off a batch of more provocative titles under the heading Terribly Inappropriate and Uncomfortable Genderfucking Animation. The festival will feature an associated event, Game Days, which for the second time will provide lectures by game developers from Central Europe as well as the presentation of new projects.

The complete line-up is available on the festival’s website.

Fest Anča runs from 24-28 June in Žilina, Slovakia.