This programme is the result of a collaboration between the Annecy Festival and Animafest Zagreb. Like us, the Zagreb team also decided to highlight stop-motion animation's importance during their 2014 festival. The synchronicity of our objectives brought us (Daniel Suljic and myself) to do an exchange; I concocted a French stop-motion programme that was recently screened at Zagreb and Daniel Suljic has done the same with Croatian stop-motion, to be screened at Annecy 2014.
Even though the programme opens with the first Croatian puppet film, made in 1959 by Branko Ranitovic, it is mostly composed of recent productions that testify to stop-motion's comeback at Zagreb; seven out of the nine films in the programme were made after 2006 (including four in the past two years). Here's your chance to discover this obscure industry with some never before seen films like the destabilising and experimental The Tiniest, by Tomislav Soban, or the refined Simulacra, by Ivana Bosnjak and Thomas Johnson.