Country Hungary
Golden Bird is a small, beautifully judged piece that does a surprising amount in seven minutes. The work of Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz, it is a striking black-and-white line drawing brought to life, and I liked it a great deal. Three and a half stars for a
Country Poland
If You Want Peace, Prepare for War is a genuinely lovely piece of craft that runs out of things to say almost before it has begun. Zofia Oraczewska's short is a delicate, distinctive bit of work, closer to paper art than animation in the traditional sense, and it
Country Estonia
Incipit Vita Nova is a gloriously strange little thing, and I mean that as a high compliment. Hardi Volmer's Estonian short barely feels like an animation at first, playing more like a surreal live-action oddity, before it tips its hero into a fantastical world and the stop-
Article
One of the real treats of this year's Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival is Politics of the Imagination: Animations of the Eastern Bloc, a programme gathering shorts made between 1958 and 1992, from the far side of the Iron Curtain. It is a title that tells you exactly
Country Czech Republic
Every so often you watch something and simply marvel at the craft of it, and Jan Švankmajer's Jabberwocky is exactly that. This is the third or fourth of the great Czech surrealist's stop-motion pieces I have seen, and it is comfortably the most accomplished. In
Country United Kingdom
Every so often a film stops me in my tracks on the strength of its images alone, and Andreea-Lorena Florea's Dance of the Spirits is one of the rare ones. It is a six-minute animated short that is, visually, among the most beautiful things I have
Country Italy
There is a lovely, aching idea at the heart of The Clouds of Odessa, and it is almost enough to carry the film on its own. Luca Arcangeli's thirteen-minute animated short follows a Ukrainian film-maker dreaming of a love story she longs to put on screen
Country Tunisia
There is a lot that is admirable about Rami Jarboui's The Bird's Placebo, a twenty-minute animated short from Tunisia with a genuinely novel story and a real heart to it. It is the sort of film I want to champion, and yet when I step
Country United Kingdom
I try to find something to hold onto in everything I watch, some spark of intention or craft even when a film is not working, but Sacha Beeley's Babyface defeated me. It is a six-minute animated short that I found close to unwatchable, an amateurish, charmless little
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