Juan Pablo Zaramello (foto: Animanima)

 

The international animation festival ANIMANIMA is being held this year from September 19-23 in Čačak, organized by the Cultural Centre in Čačak and sponsored by the City of Čačak and the Ministry of Culture, with the support of the European Union. This year, Čačak is the host of the “Serbian Capital of Culture”, so Animanima 2023 is an integral part of this large and important program.

This is the 17th edition of Animanima. The first festival was held in 2007 and the first winner of Animanima’s Grand prize was the art collective Black Heart Gang from South Africa, while the honorary lifetime award was awarded to the doyen of the famous Zagreb School, Borivoje Dovniković. Since then until today, the festival has shown hundreds of short animated works literally from all over the world, and the festival guests and jury members were outstanding world animators: Andreas Hykade, Joan C. Gratz, Stephen Woloshen, Georges Schwizgebel, Geza M. Toth, Hefang Wei, Franck Dion, Koji Yamamura and many others.

This year’s Animanima has the honour and pleasure of hosting another great name in world animation, the Argentine Juana Pablo Zaramella. A retrospective of his films as well as a master class within the speaking program AnimanimaTALKS, where the animation students will be able to see and hear the guests of this year’s edition of the festival are eagerly awaited. Zaramella will lead the jury of the main competition program, which will feature 32 films from 18 countries, Our multi-award-winning animation director Ana Nedeljković, whose latest film About money and happiness will be presented to the festival audience in the program “Contemporary Serbian Animation”, as well as the Portuguese Joao Gonzalez whose film Ice Merchants was one of the short-listed films for the American Academy Award.

In the programs of the Animanima 2023 Festival, we highlight the screening of the “Cardboard Fortress: Eight Stories About Freedom”. The delicate subject is treated from different angles of the authors, but these are not only the critical views of the authors of the films, but also a demonstration of the influence to absorb the seriousness of the topics and to communicate the whole range of relevant meanings and values in a specific language.

The youngest audience in Čačak will also have the opportunity to enjoy entertainment in the Great Hall of the Cultural Centre. A special program, AnimanimaKIDS, has been designed for them, and it will offer stories about friendship and love, about unusual characters, situations and events, which will make them laugh and amuse them, and which they will remember for a long time. This program is also juried by the following jury members Alexander Gratzer (Austria), Andrijana Ružić (Italy) and Máté Horesnyi (Hungary).

As part of the accompanying programs, there is a project of Animanima’s artistic director Milen Alempijević, done in cooperation with the art historian from Milan, Andrijana Ružić. It is the exhibition “Comics & Jazz: Rhythms of the Space”. This project was supported by the European Union, and the common denominator of the works of ten European screenwriters and cartoonists is the topic of jazz in comics, as a way to examine the possibilities and limits of the media in comics, and at the same time to make a visual tribute to great jazz stylists such as Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, John Coltrane and others.

This, of course, is not all that visitors will be able to see from September 19-23 at the Animanima in Čačak, and more about the programs is available on the website of the event: www.animanima.org