Shorts

Two Latvian Animation Shorts, 'Kafka in Love' and 'Freeride in C' Make a 2024 Festival Fall Premiere

ZF Team 11 October 2024

Latvian Zane Oborenko and Edmunds Jansons have two brand new animation shorts to showcase in the film and animation circuit.

'Kafka. In Love', the latest animated short film by Latvian director Zane Oborenko will have its national premiere at the Riga International Film Festival on October 23rd, followed by the international premiere at the PÖFF Shorts in Estonia (8-20 November 2024). Inspired by the famed Letters to Milena by Franz Kafka, the film explores the complex emotional landscape of falling in love, as revealed through Kafka’s intimate correspondence with Milena Jesenská.

'Kafka. In Love' is brought to life using the painstaking and intricate art of sand animation, a technique that perfectly mirrors the fragile and shifting emotions portrayed in the film. "Sand has a natural texture and organic origin that makes it the perfect medium for expressing the transient illusions and complex feelings we experience when we fall in love," explains Oborenko. Finding the right sand for the animation was a challenge in itself, with the team consulting geologists before finally discovering an ideal type of sand from a dune in Latvia, as well as desert sand from a Prague pet shop.

The film transports viewers into a world where Kafka’s letters to Milena reveal a side of the writer that is rarely seen in his literary works.

"The primary interest and goal of this film was to portray the constant emotional shifts that the human mind undergoes when dealing with strong and complicated emotions – from positive to negative, influenced by fantasy and intruding reality - Zane Oborenko

Produced by Sabīne Andersone of Latvia's Atom Art and co-produced by the Czech studio Maurfilm (Martin Vandas, Alena Vandasová) the film's demanding technique - 4 specially built sand animation tables were used for animators in both countries- took 6 years to make (the project had previously won the Best Short Film Project Award at the 2019 CEE Animation Forum).

Edmunds Jansons, the acclaimed Latvian director (Jacob, Mimmi and the Talking Dogs, Guard of Honour). has just premiered his latest animated short film at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. This experimental animation explores the world of winter sports, showcasing skiers as they navigate snow-covered mountains.

Jansons, a passionate skier, found his inspiration in the energy of ski resorts, which he describes as “the perfect mise-en-scène for animation.” For him, the constant motion of skiers, dressed in bold, abstract costumes, mirrored the ritualistic dance of life. The film’s soundtrack features Terry Riley’s composition 'In C', performed by The Young Gods.

The score of In C consists of 53 modules that performers can loop as long as they wish. This creates unpredictable melodic and rhythmic landscapes. In animation, repetition and looping have been a natural part of the medium’s vocabulary from the early days of pre-cinematic toys to the gifs of the internet age. This film is my attempt to unite these two art forms into a coherent and organic whole - Edmunds Jansons

This approach stems from Jansons’ broader theoretical study, Repetitions and Loops as a Form-Building Element in Author Animation, in which he examines how the structural elements of contemporary music can be applied to animated filmmaking. 'Freeride in C' is both a part of this academic study and a practical exploration of its ideas.