More than 350 short and feature films from around the world, grouped in 90 screenings, are included this year in the program of the Animest International Animation Festival (October 4 – 13).
Soul (dir. Pete Docter, Kemp Powers)
For 10 days, viewers of all ages will enjoy the animated stories on the big screens in Bucharest, many of them presented by their creators themselves, special guests at the event. The full program and tickets for the 19th Animest are available online today.
“I always experience very strong emotions when the document with the edition program appears. It’s the signal that we’ve entered the last hundred meters and the final sprint begins, we have to finalize as quickly as possible everything that remains to be done for the meeting with the public and there are always a lot of details. Then, during a break, I open the tab with the program and discover a new projection that I had forgotten about and I can’t believe that we managed to collect so many wonders again in 10 days.”, said Filip Manișor, the executive director of Animest.
The urban adventure begins this year with Annecy Cristal winner Memoir of a Snail, a drama directed by Adam Elliot, told with great humor and authenticity, scheduled for the Opening Gala on Friday, October 4, at Sala Luceafărul (formerly Cinema Pro) .
The Most Precious of the Cargoes (dir. Michel Hazanavicius)
With three awards at the 2024 edition of Annecy (Best Original Music, Audience Award and Jury Award), as well as the Un Certain Regard trophy at the Cannes Film Festival, the feature film Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis. It’s a sensitive, all-ages story about the survival of a cat and her mute friends in a post-apocalyptic world, told through eye-catching visuals and characters full of charm and strong personality traits. The film, distributed in Romania by Bad Unicorn, will have two screenings at Animest, on October 5 and 12.
Also from the Croazêta, directly from the official competition, and also for the premiere in Romania, you can see on the big screens at Animest.19, the newest film of the French director Michel Hazanavicius, known to the whole world for the authentic feature film The Artist, awarded with an Oscar in 2011. This time the director offers the audience a moving story in which hope creeps in amidst the Holocaust. The Most Precious of the Cargoes, the first animated film to enter the competition for a Palme d’Or, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Jean-Claude Grumberg, follows the life of a baby thrown from a “death train” and rescued by a forester and his wife. The feature film, described by Variety as “a parable that will not soon be forgotten”, reaches the Romanian public, during the festival, on October 5 and 13.
Other national premieres that can be seen at the 19th edition of Animest are The Glassworker (dir. Usman Riaz), one of the surprises of the year in the world of animation, a Pakistani film about the power of love in a country divided by war and Slide, the latest animation from American director Bill Plympton, a western set in the 40s that has all the elements of a classic of the genre – cowboys and villains, country music and tense confrontations.
Not to be missed is director Pablo Berger’s animated debut, Robot Dreams, nominated for this year’s Oscars, about the atypical friendship between a dog and a robot, screening presented by art director Jose Luis Agreda. Also not to be missed is the stop-motion animation about the life of the genius Da Vinci, directed by Jim Capobianco and Pierre-Luc Granjon, Leo, the Inventor, in the presence of co-director Granjon. These two films will also have an accessible screening for people with hearing impairments, with descriptive subtitles and interpretation in Romanian sign language, as part of Animest.19.
Flow (dir. Gints Zilbalodis)
The program of the out-of-competition feature film section is completed by the Disney|PIXAR production Suflet / Soul (dir. Pete Docter, Kemp Powers) – a fantastic journey of a middle school teacher, passionate about jazz, who learns about how the soul is built and which it is his essence. The characters come to life through the voices of well-known film actors Jamie Foxx, Tina Fey and Graham Norton.
The Jonathan Hodgson Retrospective: A Collection of Deeply Human Stories
Fans of director Jonathan Hodgson, one of the biggest names in contemporary animation, should not miss the Retrospective dedicated to him during the festival, on Tuesday, October 8, from 19:00 at Cinemateca Eforie. This includes 12 of his short films, including Dogs (1981), Feeling My Way (1997), The Man with Beautiful Eyes (2000), Roughhouse (2019), as well as the moving Save the Children – Mariupol: Margarita’s Story (2023). The Jonathan Hodgson Retrospective will also screen his first feature film, The Trouble with Love and Sex, made in 2011 for the BBC – a foray into the counseling rooms of relationship support service Relate, as clients struggle with ingrained fantasies in champagne and impotence, with dark family secrets and shocking confessions of infidelity. The screening will take place on Thursday, October 9, from 8:30 p.m., at the Cervantes Institute.
Jonathan Hodgson will give a masterclass during the festival (Friday October 11, 11:00), Drawing on Reality, in which he will talk about his creative process. He is also part of the Short Film Jury and will hand out the Animest.19 Trophy, worth 2500 euros, offered by the ICR. Throughout his extensive career spanning over 40 years, he has directed animation in a wide variety of formats, and since 2008 has been the animation course coordinator at Middlesex University in London.
