Carte Blanche to Fantoche (Swiss Animation Tribute)

Switzerland is centre stage this year! For this occasion the Annecy Festival is thrilled to be able to offer festivalgoers 9 films concocted by the Fantoche Festival, Switzerland’s most important animation festival.

"A newcomer to the Swiss festival scene, a fresh green apparition in Zurich’s cultural melting pot", is how Fantoche describes itself at its first edition in 1995. Never mind! This new kid on the block knew how to make a good impression and subsequently become an unmissable global animation film event.

Concrete observations, almost fairy tale narratives, desires and oddly intimate abstractions: The program curated by Fantoche focuses on experimental Swiss animation short films.

Aletsch Negative (2019) by Laurence Bonvin portrays the largest glacier in the Alps and its merciless melting. Images of this microcosm symbolise the problems of the macrocosm, Earth. Laura Solari tells an anti-capitalist tale of the workers' struggle in The Marxiane Chronicles (2010). Michael Frei's Kids (2019) questions the uniqueness of each and every one of us, and the difficulty of escaping group dynamics, and Simone Hörler's The Hour of Noon (2019) strikes a precise balance between abstraction and figuration, powerfully demonstrating how little it takes to stretch our imagination.

All nine short films were selected entries in the national and partly in the international Fantoche competition from the past 12 years. More than half of the films were honored at Fantoche. They come from German, French and Italian parts of Switzerland and thus provide an insight into the diverse works that the Swiss experimental animation film scene has to offer. Fantoche is the largest international animation film festival in Switzerland with around 25,000 admissions annually, the meeting place for the industry and screens over 370 films during the festival. Fantoche will celebrate its 20^th edition from 6^th-11^th September 2022.

To discover the festival, visit the website!