The new, 16th edition of the Balkanima Festival will take place from October 1st to October 6th in New Belgrade. The festival hosts four competition selections, four student and non-competition selection, and will feature a total of 125 short animated films from 25 European countries.
The best films of the festival will be decided by a jury consisting of: Joni Manisto, animator and professor from Finland, Piotr Kardas, producer and organizer of the festival from Poland and Pavle Zelić, writer, critic and screenwriter from Belgrade. Tal Kantor, an Israeli animator, Lea Vidaković, a local visual artist and animator, and Ivan Arsenijević, a film and art director at the Student Cultural Center in Kragujevac are in charge of evaluating the student films. Lazar Bodroža, a Serbian film director, will decide on the best Serbian animated film. At the official opening of the festival, on October 1st, the world premiere, with an accompanying exhibition of the work process, will feature a short film The Death of Mother Jugović by Mihajlo Dragaš.
Among the accompanying programs we highlight the program of Finnish animation collectives to be presented by Joni Manisto, member of the jury for the main competition program; the documentary-animated program from the Rising of Lusitania – AnimaDoc festival inLiverpool; the program of Bezalel Academy films from Jerusalem, as well as Milen Alempijević’s lecture on animation and advertising. The more practical part of the festival program will include a workshop by Stevan Živkov on character modeling for animated film and a workshop on the development of an animation studio to be held by Vojin Vasović. The last day of the festival is dedicated to the project “24 Hours of Comic Book Drawing”, organized by the art director Maida Gruden. This is an international event, a comic book drawing day held in various cities around the world, and for the first time Belgrade is on officially participating.
You can learn more about the festival at http://www.balkanima.org/ and https://www.facebook.com/balkanima/. Festival entry is completely free.
Establishedin 2004, at the initiative of proffesor Nikola Majdak (1927-2013), the first artistic director of the festival, Balkanima’s mission is to supporting and promoting local animation as well as production, collaboration and exchange in the region and with Europe, and training young authors and students during active workshops in the festival program.