Fest Anča’s Animated Documentary Section: Nightmares Inspired by Our Reality (GoCritic! Review)

Swimming with wings animation film still

A flying eye with webbed wings. A snail with a human skull instead of a shell. A rat with the head of a bird. All these and other bizarre creatures appear on the poster for the 17th edition of Slovakia's Fest Anča (25-30 June), pointing to this year’s theme: nightmares in all their forms.

Any adult knows that imaginary creatures from under a child's bed or a dark closet are not as frightening as we are. As Nietzsche wrote, man is the cruelest animal. This is depicted with remarkable sincerity and accuracy in the films selected for the festival’s Short Animated Documentary programme.

The section opens with 'Swimming with Wings' by Israeli animator Daphna Awadish, about the adaptation process for children who find themselves in emigration. The film follows a girl from Israel who moved with her parents to the Netherlands to get away from the constant threat of war. The girl misses her homeland, where her grandparents remain, and she has to go through the difficult process of adapting to a foreign country.

Awadish uses a fitting visual metaphor to tell this story: documentary footage of young penguins swimming in the ocean. For greater impact, human clothing is drawn over the real-life lines of the birds’ bodies. Like young birds learning to swim in the depths, adapting to this emigration requires time, calm and deep breathing, and, of course, support from friends who are going through the same experience as the heroine.

The director has created a poignant and largely therapeutic film with the central idea that emigration is like swimming in a pool. At first, you are afraid you will drown, but then you see that it's not so scary if you learn to paddle in the right direction.

Another film in the selection, 'A Border Guard and His Dog' by Spanish director Pablo Ballarín, also deals with displacement - the migrant crisis on the border of Belarus and the European Union.



Interestingly, filmmakers on both sides of the border have already reflected upon this topic. Besides the best-known example, Agnieszka Holland’s drama 'The Green Border', there have been documentaries such as 'The Forest' by Lidia Duda, about activist families living in the Białowieża Forest, or Agniezka Zwiefka’s 'Silent Trees', about a Kurdish family stuck in no man’s land where animation is used to bring the heroine’s memories to life. In Belarus, the life of migrants has been captured by Dmitry Dedok in And Again Belarus.

Ballarín has approached the dramatic story of the confrontation on the Belarusian-Polish border with ingenuity and humor, telling it from the perspective of a Polish border guard and his shepherd dog Rex. The partners catch and send back the uninvited guests who have decided to enter the country without documents over the newly built fence. They also watch activists in the forest help the foreigners in trouble through binoculars. The voice-over describes the routine of the border guard's work with a dose of absurdity and postmodern irony, leaving the viewer ambiguous as to how they should react to the events taking place on screen. The film is presented through simple pencil drawings, similar to those drawn by a child in their notebook, which further emphasizes the director’s ironic stance. The result is a compact black comedy about the now routine border conflict that has remained unresolved for the third year.

Another film, 'Ardent Other' by French director Alice Brygo, is also imbued with anxiety. The filmmaker captures the faces of agitated city dwellers watching a grand event with tension and fear.


Which event? At first, the authors do not reveal it, but almost immediately the documentary footage of the urban background gives way to an empty, dark blue space where digitized models of the characters begin to appear. The silent crowd gradually finds its voice and the viewer realizes that the pride of the French Republic - Notre-Dame de Paris - is burning. However, the director is primarily interested not in the event itself, as the disaster is not shown in the film, but in Parisians’ reactions to it through the multitude of voices and opinions.

The camera that the characters are apparently oblivious to slowly glides from one figure to the next, gradually widening the shot to show an increasing number of people, as if eavesdropping on their thoughts and emotional remarks. Here, a left-wing young person openly gloats that a “place of child corrupters” has burned down. An elderly man, on the other hand, laments that the heart of the capital is engulfed in flames.

Brygo's film is essentially about the complexity and fragmentation of French society (or any other society), which awakens and unites during the moments of greatest upheaval, but also shows cracks of division. The film’s only drawback is the excessive length - some trimming definitely wouldn't do it any harm. Fortunately, the knowledge that the cathedral has already been successfully restored and will soon open to visitors helps alleviate the anxiety stirred by watching the film.

All three of these films illustrate the complexity of human life, using animation to depict details that even the most attentive documentary filmmaker's camera cannot capture.

(cover image: 'Swimming with wings' by Daphna Awadish)

contributed by: Taras Tarnalitsky

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