Rosto: Film Retrospective Presentation

 

 

The Unique Universe of Rosto

Expect to get lost in a world of crossroads and rock 'n' roll, parallel worlds and time-zones, mirrors and alter egos, roadmaps and Evil Wicked Whale. Dutch media artist Rosto has created a unique, complex and extensive mixed-media universe, with mysterious landscapes and cryptic road trips. Sometimes hallucinating and delusional, sometimes surreal and enchanting, always outspoken. The layered narrative of the visual songs or musical shorts is rich in winks and existential questions. An overwhelming, unforgettable cinematic experience.

It all began with a series of rock 'n' roll songs that Rosto has been writing since 1995. The songs were the inspiration for the serial graphic novel Mind My Gap that started in 1998. With the rise of the internet it quickly incarnated online: 26 episodes were published irregularly until 2014. During these years the project spawned a series of short films, a trilogy: Beheaded (2000), Anglobilly Feverson (2002), Jona/Tomberry (2005) and spin-off The Monster of Nix (2011). The Monster of Nix attracted collaborations with international musicians and voices, including the Metropole Orchestra, The Residents, Terry Gilliam and Tom Waits. In the meantime, the original Songs From My Gap were recorded within Rosto’s music project Thee Wreckers. Three of these songs have been released as short music films: No Place Like Home (2008), Lonely Bones (2013) and Splintertime (2015) – building up to a intended tetralogy. Over the years Rosto has acquired prestige internationally and received critical acclaim and countless awards, among others in Annecy, Brussels, Cannes, Melbourne, Ottawa and Utrecht and last but not least the brand new Visionary Award at the Sapporo Festival 2015, especially introduced to honour Rosto’s work.

 

 

Anet ter Horst: Contemporary Dutch Animation Highlights

 

The Netherlands has a long and firm tradition in animated cinema. For the most part, its splendid reputation was earned by the autonomous short film. It is internationally renowned and praised for its high standards, having experienced an unprecedented heyday in the 1970s. This was the reason for Gerrit van Dijk and Gerben Schermer to dedicate themselves to an animation film festival in this country at the time. Founded in 1985, the Holland Animation Film Festival (HAFF) takes place in springtime over a period of five days on several locations in the city of Utrecht in the heart of the Netherlands. HAFF closely monitors the developments within the medium and cherishes quality and innovation. HAFF is known for its passion for the continuation of animation as an independent art form and an idiosyncratic approach. This programme with Dutch highlights of recent festival editions offers an overview of contemporary Dutch animation. Films that often also receive acclaim elsewhere, or that bring a special talent into the limelight, like Hisko Hulsing or Mischa Rozema, who work on quite ambitious projects internationally.

In recent years, vivacious plans for the development of feature films, family films and cross-over productions have been blossoming in the Netherlands. Animation is expanding. Dutch artists in the fields of animation, game, media art and visual art successfully work on combining the best of those worlds. The programme covers a wide spectrum of genres, themes and techniques. It displays new developments and fresh ideas, narrative and non-narrative films, professional films and student films, funny films and committed films, bright and with a certain edge.

Enjoy!

And don’t miss the excellent Dutch films and artists in other programme sections, the truly unique, unparalleled works of Rosto of course, but also the brilliant documentary I Love Hooligans by Jan-Dirk Bouw and the 2015 Oscar-nominated short A Single Life by Job, Joris & Marieke

Anet ter Horst

Holland Animation Film Festival

 

 

 

Julie Roy: Film Programme Presentation

 

First, thank you to Igor Prassel and the Animateka team for giving me the opportunity to present this carte blanche that groups together some of my productions from 2008 to present day. As a producer for a Canadian public institution, the National Film Board of Canada, I am committed to supporting various talents, from the newest to the most experienced, guiding artists in creative pursuits, some of which are traditional and others completely unique, and exploring narrative forms that are sometimes classic and sometimes completely surprising. Moreover, this is what has built the NFB studio brand over the years. This multiplicity of approaches, the experimentation, research, innovation, all carried out in artisanal fashion by directors who control every step of their work’s production. And still today, we owe this to the pioneering vision of the NFB’s animation studio founder, Norman McLaren. Nearly 75 years later, this creation philosophy lives in and still inspires our animation artists who create within our community day after day.

 

Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to help you discover talented directors through eight short films that cover a very wide variety of subject matter. From a tale about the history of an African musical instrument to violence in a working-class neighbourhood, from metaphysical questions through the mythical tool that is the pin screen to the theme of marginality or the sensitive issue of intolerance to electromagnetic waves, from the exploration of urban life through a high-colour, non-linear approach to the transposition of human history through a clay-like medium or an ecological tale sung by cars, each of these works brilliantly asserts the evocative power of animation through the unique views of their creator.

Julie Roy

 

Robert Morgan: Film Retrospective Presentation

 

First, thank you to Igor Prassel and the Animateka team for giving me the opportunity to present this carte blanche that groups together some of my productions from 2008 to present day. As a producer for a Canadian public institution, the National Film Board of Canada, I am committed to supporting various talents, from the newest to the most experienced, guiding artists in creative pursuits, some of which are traditional and others completely unique, and exploring narrative forms that are sometimes classic and sometimes completely surprising. Moreover, this is what has built the NFB studio brand over the years. This multiplicity of approaches, the experimentation, research, innovation, all carried out in artisanal fashion by directors who control every step of their work’s production. And still today, we owe this to the pioneering vision of the NFB’s animation studio founder, Norman McLaren. Nearly 75 years later, this creation philosophy lives in and still inspires our animation artists who create within our community day after day.

 

Robert Morgan (1974) was raised in the cursed town of Yateley, England. At the tender age of three, he developed a passion for cinema when he saw Fiend Without A Face (1958), a British black and white science-fiction film about mysterious deaths at the hands of an invisible life-form that steals human brains and spinal columns. As a result, he became a weird kid obsessed with monsters and the things that hide under rocks. He now lives and works (under his home label studio Swartz Can Talk) in a haunted house in London.

Morgan graduated in 1997 from the Surrey Institute of Art and Design, where he majored in animation, with his diploma stop-motion film The Man in the Lower-Left Hand Corner of the Photograph, a creepy story about a lonely old geezer and a maggot. In 2001, he made The Cat With Hands, a masterpiece horror tale about a very bad pussycat, shot partly live partly stop-motion animated. It was inspired by a recurring nightmare Rob’s older sister Eleanor had when she was young. In 2003, Robert made The Separation, a stop-motion jewel that won 15 international awards and got Morgan a definite worldwide recognition. A story about the separation of conjoined twins and its extraordinary consequences, made a member of the audience at the Stuttgart festival faint from emotional shock, which made Robert most happy and determined to carry on making films.

Structured like a downward spiral into madness, Bobby Yeah (2011) is set in a kaleidoscopic world which furthers Morgan’s fascination with body as abject object and physical transformations, as well as his characteristic twisting of spaces, creating another isolated character seemingly living in an inward world of his own fabrication. According to the author, Bobby Yeah was made completely without storyboard or animatic in one of his home rooms, where he was having fun and was relaxing building up a rhythmic composition during a period of almost three years. He was using the set as a playground to liberate his stream-of-consciousness, just like his favoured film directors David Cronenberg, Ingmar Bergman, Tim Burton, the Quay Brothers or David Lynch worked in some of their films.

Looking forward for more Robert Morgan bizarre filmic experiments!

Igor Prassel, Animateka

 

Jean-Luc Slock: Film Programme Presentation

 

The animation studio Camera-etc based in Liège, Belgium, was created in 1979 by Jean-Luc Slock basically to produce animation projects with social and cultural goals. Thousands of children, youngsters and adults in the country and around the world have participated in animation workshops, producing hundreds of animated shorts. These films are mostly used as sensibilisation tools for citizenship items and are screened in educational networks. Funded by the Cinema department of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation, Camera-etc’s assignment is to use animation as a psycho-social means of personal and collective development.
Nowadays, a permanent team of 14 persons is working on 5 different types of projects: collective workshops, auteur films, international cooperation, social advertising and music videos. The retrospective includes 8 international awarded films recently produced by the studio. The program gives an overview of the eclecticism of Camera-etc animators, from the fresh Yoyo’s adventures, made with children, the very emotional Butoyi, a film about child abuse done with teenagers in Burundi, the strange adult collective film Reptile smile, 4 of our auteur films including Mathieu Labaye’s hit Orgesticulanismus, to the music clip for Yew featuring Belgian rock musician Arno.