It is a little-known fact that Władysław Starewicz (better known as Ladislas Starevich) was one of the forefathers of still-motion animation. Starewicz was born to Polish parents and made ground-breaking films in the 1910s.
To celebrate the anniversary of the first of Starewicz's film experiments, the Se-Ma-For Film Festival was founded in 2010. The festival is one of the first international events dedicated to stop motion animation, puppet films and three-dimensional techniques.
One of the fundamental aims of the festival - besides competitions and accompanying screenings - is to create an international forum devoted to issues of co-production and ways of gathering European funds on film culture, and an international forum devoted to the issues of child cinema and stop motion animation.
This year's edition also includes numerous accompanying screenings. This year, it focuses on the Polish EU presidency. A special spot is dedicated to Hungarian and Danish animation - the countries that hand the presidency over to Poland (Hungary) and then take over (Denmark). Switzerland also plays an important role in this year's festival.
Audiences are able to take part in a number of animated journeys (thematic, historical and monographic) presenting the limitless possibilities of this unusual technique that is a combination of plastic arts, film and music. Each day ends with a film premiere. These include "A Town Called Panic" (Belgium / Luxembourg, 2009, 76') by Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar - the most expensive film in the history of Swiss cinematography and a laureate of the Audience Award at Annecy, "Max & Co" (Belgium / France / Switzerland / UK, 2007, 76’) by Samuel Guillaume and Frédéric Guillaume, as well as an alternative history of World War II called "Jackboots on Whitehall" (UK, 2010, 91’) by Edward and Rory McHenry.
This year's festival also screens retrospectives of films by Nag Ansorge, Ferenc Cakó, Jerzy Kucia and Marek Skrobeckim together with a presentation of stop motion animations by students and graduates of the most famous Hungarian artistic university - the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest. Included in the programme are also retrospectives of classic Hungarian (Ottó Foky, Zoltán Olcsai Kiss, Gyula Varsányi) and Swiss stop motion animators; presentations of the most talented young Danish stop-motion creators (Tor Fruergaard, Tobias Gundorff Boesen, Alex Brüel Flagstad), the Łódź premiere of the marionette film "Strings" (Denmark / Norway / Sweden / UK, 2004, 88’), with participation and a special presentation of a puppet master, Bernd Ogrodnik (the chairman of the International Contest jury).
Fans of all kinds of movie abstraction can take part in an overview of Len Lay's experimental films on the 110th anniversary of the artist's birthday, and see a set of collages by Jodie Mack, an unusually talented US animator, as well as an overview of unpretentious production by Dead Flaj Prodakszyns from Łódź.
The festival also features a number of workshops, including one by Krzysztof Brzozowski, one of the most distinguished animators in Europe. For the young members of the audience, there is an artistic workshop of Se-Ma-For's Museum of Tales.
Music is also an essential part of the festival, which sees the premiere of the SzaZa Na Dobranoc project, where the Warsaw duo made up of Paweł Szamburski and Patryk Zakrocki, commemorate the hundredth birthday of Karol Baraniecki (the creator of Zaczarowany Ołówek) and Czesław Janczarski (creator of the literary character of Miś Uszatek), and reminisce over Piotr Hertl, the author of the music for cult children's TV shows.
Among the guests of the festival this year, include: Ferenc Cakó - a master of real-time sand animation, one of most outstanding contemporary artists in Hungary; Bernd Ogrodnik - master of puppet animation from Iceland, co-creator of the famous 'Strings'; Ferenc Mikulás - the director of Kecskemét Animation Studio (Hungary's biggest animation studio) and KAFF (Kecskeméti Animáció Filmfesytival, Hungary's first animation festival), as well as Christophe Gautry - one of the more promising modern puppet animation creators.
The Polish leg of the festival takes place in Łódź between 22-25 September 2011 and the international segment takes place in the Swiss city of Lugano18-20 November 2011.
For more information see the Se-Ma-For page.
Source: press release.