EKO 9 x StopTrik
Monsters and Other Species. Contemporary Art-House Stop Motion as an Environment of Horror
Curated by Olga Bobrowska, director of StopTrik IFF
Matchmade in heaven, or rather in horror: EKO 9 presents a fantastic collaboration with StopTrik IFF dedicated to the art of stop motion animation and Pekarna Magdalenske mreže. For one evening the scenic garden of the old sanatorium will immerse into an eerie atmosphere which will be created by a selection of short animated films entitled Monsters and Other Species curated by the festival’s director Olga Bobrowska.
For decades, stop motion puppet film has been prone to convey an atmosphere of eeriness, decay, an unspoken beauty of danger. Whenever the poetics of art-house animation revokes tropes and motifs of classical genre cinema, it does so in order to twist it, dismantle a fetishized structure, and above all, to refocus the spectator’s attention to the genre markers of intense, ambiguous nature. An uneasy familiarity of puppet, clay, and pixilation techniques generate peculiarly fantastic ambients and architectures where horror stories may transform into patchwork commentaries on monstrous conditions of living in our reality. Contemporary stop motion art-house strangely rhymes with the remarks posed by Polish literary scholar, Grzegorz Czemiel, who analysed Jeff VanderMeer’s works in the spirit of ecopoetics reading:
“As we traverse the unwelcome landscapes of the collapsed city along with the protagonists, we are uncannily displaced into a weird reality which, through its extreme conditions, brings a realisation that perhaps the idyllic vision of a thriving global civilization is a spectre that haunts a more real life within an unstable, unsustainable ecosystem that is running out of control.” (“Making Kin in Broken Places. Post-apocalyptic Adolescence and Care in Jeff VanderMeer’s Borne.”, 2018).
The haunted imagination of the artists from Poland, Mexico, and Japan, are countered with an ironically pleasurable, last film of Paul Bush, a British master of experimental animation who passed away last year.
In case of bad weather the screening is cancelled.
List of films:
Such Miracles Do Happen / Takie cuda się zdarzają
Barbara Rupik (Film School Lodz)
2022, Poland, 14′
To the surprise of the village residents, all of a sudden, the stone figure of Virgin Mary starts moving, leaves the chapel and begins to walk ahead. Soon, it is joined by other animated sculptures. Miracles do happen and they fascinate the most a little boneless girl. This frame-by-frame animation captivates the viewer with the world made of images, plasticine and lace. Yet again, Barbara Rupik created an animation in which ugliness is attractive and otherness is mysterious and magical.
Tio / Tío
Juan J. Medina (IMCiNE)
2021, Mexico, 12’40”
A stop motion film set in a dystopian world where a twelve-year old named Martín comes from a family of miners. On his first day of work, Martin, a cocky teenager, will learn the importance of rituals and respect for ancestors.
Blink in the Desert
Shinobu Soejima (Tokyo University of the Arts)
2021, Japan, 10’27”
Malice comes up abruptly. As if it is blinking. Capricious like a flapping insect. One day a young hermit finds a winged insect and crushes it out of disgust.
Orgiastic Hyper-Plastic
Paul Bush
2020, Demark, United Kingdom, 7′
An animated extravaganza of plastic collected from beaches, roadsides, attics and junk shops. This is an elegy to a love affair that has gone sour, a fond farewell to that most beautiful material that has enslaved our planet – plastic.
StopTrik IFF, a unique international celebration of worldwide stop motion animation takes place in two European countries, Slovenia (Maribor) and Poland (Łódź). Once a year the city of Maribor becomes an alternative capital of animation thanks to the festival of highest quality film programme, inspiring additional events and inventive professional workshops of stop motion filmmaking. StopTrik vibe tears down the “red carpet” barriers – the audiences, guest filmmakers, and the organizers spend time together watching films, discussing traditions and new trends of animation, creating new works, and partying at the end of the day. In 2024 the 14th edition of the festival will take place between 25 and 29 September in various locations in Maribor. The festival is produced by Pekarna Magdalenske mreže.
Olga Bobrowska (1987) is a film and animation scholar who obtained her PhD in Humanities (Art Studies) at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków (Poland) in 2020. Currently she lectures on the subject of animated film history at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw. Her dissertation discussed trends and tendencies in Chinese animation between 1957 and 1989. She is a festival director and co-founder of the StopTrik International Film Festival (Maribor, Slovenia / Lodz, Poland). Bobrowska frequently serves as a juror at various festivals (e.g. Cinanima, Espinho, Portugal; Tricky Women/Tricky Realities International Animation Film Festival, Vienna, Austria; Animafest Zagreb World Festival of Animated Film, Zagreb, Croatia; Animateka International Film Festival, Ljubljana, Slovenia; and other festivals in Europe, USA and China), and has also served as a member of selection committees (Krakow Film Festival; Etiuda&Anima International Film Festival, Krakow, Poland). She has extensively written on Chinese, Polish and European animated film and co-edited two monographs: Obsession Perversion Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation (2016) and Propaganda, Ideology, Animation. Twisted Dreams of History (2019).
