Latin American Animation Culture at the 7th StopTrik: Festival Highlights

Latin American Animation Culture at the 7th StopTrik: Festival Highlights

StopTrik cherishes stop motion (in liberal, non-exclusive terms),  that include narrative puppet or clay shorts, but also  cut-out silhouettes, pixilation or combine animation with live-action footage.

The festival itself wants to answer and discuss questions of film culture, intellectual challenges, aesthetic riddles and political awareness through its competitive and tribute programmes.

The International Stop Motion Competition (for traditional stop motion techniques) and "The Borderlands Competition" (for experimental ones) feature 39 films from Europe, North and South America, Australia and Asia, while non-competitive "Panorama" programme presents 13 titles from over 10 countries. Check out Dolls Don't Cry by Frédérick Tremblay, Dead Horses/ Cavalls morts, dir. Marc Riba, Anna Solanas and Farewell/ Slovo Leon Vidmar.

Latin American cultures seem distant,  sometimes exotic, but this  pop-culture iconography belies its diversity. StopTrik employs a double programme to prove the opposite.

In "The Outer Perspective", festival directors Olga and Michal Bobrowscy attempt to map artistic pursuits of Latin American animators in regard to the material (as in Marcos Magalhães's Animando or Diego Akel's Fluxos), narrative patterns (Hugo Covarrubias's The Night Face Up or Carolina Corral's Love, Our Prison), eventually social and political realities (Cecilia Traslaviña's Fabricia or Cesar Cabrall's Chalk).

"The Inner Perspective" is outlined by the Moebius Collective, a collective of filmmakers and art historians, and mostly focused on female figure and body/space representation.

Maria Leite's Tarik's Puzzle is a dark puppet film about woman-automaton in construction, created and repressed by her master; Juan Pablo Langlois and Nico Superby's Sadistic Triangle as a raw and punkish allegory speaks of lust, consumerism and media overdose; while Vivienne Barry's Like Chincol Wings evokes Chilean tradition of anti-Pinochet grass-roots protest transmitted through patchwork art (the so-called arpilleras).

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Mexican Midnight Movies (curated by Jair Salvador Flores Alvarez aka Mr. Kropka) is a set of fearsome, carnivalesque but also hilarious shorts produced in Mexico between 1998 and 2016.

Exactly 100 years ago in Argentina Italian-born animation pioneer Quirino Cristiani first-ever animated feature-length El Apostól, a political cut-out satire is being partially resurrected and represented in the festival, along with recently rediscovered other Cristiani's early works.

Workshot: Back Wall Echo, with Colombian experimental filmmaker Laura Victoria Delgado aims at combining stop motion animation practice with the reflection over earliest forms of visual expression.

Festival Journalism Workshop with acclaimed journalist Nancy Denney-Phelps revives the idea of an insightful film coverage that preserves the festival momentum.

Partners from ŻubrOFFka IFF, Poland and PAF Festival, Czech Republic will present the adventures and difficulties encountered by the European distributors of artistic shorts and video art; special programmmes from Animasivo Festival (Mexico), Festival Stop Motion Barcelona, and TAFF Turku Animated Film Fesival (Finland) complete the festival collaborations programme of the 7th StopTrik. Ivan Ivanovski from Macedonia will introduce his ironic  publishing project Illustrated Biblical Ethics as well as his dark puppet imaginarium.

 

The 7th StopTrik festival will present 125 films, among them 39 stop motion shorts competing in "International Stop Motion Competition" and an experimental "Borderlands Competition" . Festival awards are to be decided by the Maribor Audience, Lodz Audience, Maribor Students Jury, Lodz Students Jury; the invited experts and festival organizers will grant their individual special mentions. The festival takes place in Maribor (5-8 Oct 2017) and Łódź (10-12 Nov 2017)

 

 

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