4 animated European entries at Cannes Cinéfondation 2013

 Created in 1998, the Cinéfondation section of Cannes Film Festival is devoted to the search for new talent. It selects fifteen to twenty short and medium-length films each year from film schools all over the world. The Cinéfondation selection forms part of the Official Selection and the selected films are presented to the Cinéfondation and Shorts Jury which awards a prize to the best three at an official ceremony.

This year,  Cinéfondation Selection selected 18 films (14 fiction films and 4 animated films) among the 1,550 submitted this year from 277 schools from all around the world.

 2 Czech entries feature within the 4 animated selection. Pandy (Pandas) by Matúš VIZÁR comes from FAMU.    Eliška CHYTKOVÁ  with her imaginative  Ham Story (Tomas Bata University in Zlίn, Czech Republic) completes the Czech selection.

Danse Macabre by Małgorzata RŻANEK (Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, Poland) is a "rhythmic and hypnotizing reflection on death".

Ana Caro's The Magnificent Lion Boy (NFTS, UK) tells the story of  a British anthropologist, Leonard Orlov , who discovers a feral child in Africa and brings it back to Victorian London to civilise him -but tragedy results.

The three Cinéfondation Prizes will be awarded at a ceremony prior to the screening of the winning films on Friday 24th May in the Buñuel Theatre.

PANDA

The world is moving ever so fast and humans are claiming more and more space without necessarily considering the consequences. ‘Pandas’ is caught in the middle of a game where concepts of commercialism and pure voyeuristic entertainment are put side by side with notions of animal preservation. Yet, the very same ”saviors” are tampering with natural selection processes and altering the mind of the panda, thus creating a
hierarchy in terms of the value of life. ‘Panda is at this point existing at the mercy of man but all of a sudden his compromising existence is altered by events beyond his control. From that point on, a new chapter starts in the incessant struggle between man and the rest of nature.

Film Pandas was supported by Slovak audiovisual fund.

HAM STORY

The most ordinary thing about those ordinary days of our time is the everydayness, impersonal greyness and the fact that the greatest stereotype of all is that there is always something new. That greyness is what does not let the imagination perish. None of us is without imagination. None of us stamps on it and holds it chained, no matter how hard we try. None of us!
My story is about that very imagination. About the imagination which has been chained for so long, and set free with so much strength.
About playing God in a childlike and pure game.