Notes from a Studio

Notes from a Studio_03

This is a special post because it follows after several important recognitions to our work and to our authors.

We'll start this overview with the biggest piece of news: our producer Vanja Andrijević just won Albert Kapović Award for 2015! The Award is granted by the Croatian Producer’s Guild to the producers who have contributed to the quality and promotion of Croatian film in the past year. The annual ceremony took place at the Zagreb Film Festival. Not to repeat lovely words that were directed to us and to Bonobostudio, we suggest you click on the link and read all about it.

One other thing made this year very special, and that’s the start of production of the puppet-animation Hedgehog’s Home. The film is an adaptation of a very famous story by Branko Ćopić, the director is Eva Cvijanović, and co-producer – National Film Board of Canada. Puppets have been made some time ago, and the filming is in full swing! Croatian team currently working on the film includes animators Ivana Bošnjak and Thomas Johnson (advised by Tim Allen), director of photography is Ivan Slipčević, and music is being composed by Darko Rundek. Our narrator Rade Šerbedžija already did his part with success, and so did the rest of the team who made sets and puppets. We will also mention Canadian animator Elise Simard, who has been with us in our studio for a month working as a light designer. We did have a bit of a free time to visit a great exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art The Forest Unbowed and Radovan Ivšić, which has inspired us a great deal. Photos from our Sunday field trip are here, and lots of funny and cute moments from the filming are also online. And yes, finally, the first teaser is ready! ;)

In the past few months our films have travelled all over the world, and among them, one is really breaking all the records. Theodor Ushev’s Sonámbulo is unstoppable: in the first eight months it was presented at 63 festivals (TIFF among others), and it had won five awards (Ottawa, Cinanima…). We are keeping our fingers crossed for the magic 100 in the first year!

Marko Meštrović’s etheric film about levitation won two awards in the past month (October/November): creativity award at Banja Luka and best international short film at St. Louis.

Sonámbulo was presented in the international competition at DOK Leipzig together with Here There by Alexander Stewart. Alexander gave an interview about his special animated experiment to Petra Zlonoga!

Vladislav Knežević is currently promoting three experimental films at once: A.D.A.M. (2014), Binary Pitch (2013) and Archeo 29 (2010) are all doing the festival circuit, and Archeo 29 just won an award for the best 3D short at Beyond Festival in Karlsruhe.

We celebrated the International Animation Day in Tuškanac Cinema, Zagreb, hosted by ASIFA Croatia. The award for the most successful Croatian film in the past year went to Simulacra by Ivana Bošnjak and Thomas Johnson. Bravo!

There are classic festival competitions and then there are special presentations. We have participated in several! For example in Nice, where Nice Short Film Festival took place and hosted three programs of Croatian animated films. From Bonobostudio: Dove sei, amor mio by Veljko Popović, Petra Zlonoga’s Hunger, Always or Never? by Jelena Oroz, Levitation by Marko Meštrović and Conversation by Ana Horvat. We were also featured at Bucheon festival, South Korea as part of Croatian animated film program with Leviathan (Bogojević Narath), New Hippie Future (Barić) and Hunger.

If you wish to watch our films, festivals are not the only option. There’s always IndieFlix, where we have 19 films available for viewing. But we are also present at different exhibitions, sometimes for weeks or more. Here are few. Binary Pitch by V. Knežević was presented at the HICA Gallery, UK at the Programmable States? Exhibiton; after that, it was exhibited all September at the Grey Zone Gallery (New Materialisms 2), and then at Think Film 2 – Cinemaniacs in Belgrade. Ana Hušman’s film are traditionally presented in galleries: in Zagreb, Gallery Prozori will screen her film Lunch (Life: A User’s Manual) and Izodor Kršnjavi Salon her film Market (Cartoons in the Applied Art School). Market was also present this October at the Milan Expo.

Nice and crazy numbers for the end of this blog post: film Father has more than 100 thousand views on Vimeo (and more than 1,200 likes), and we have more than 700 followers on Twitter. Join them if you haven’t already!