Stoptrik International Film Festival

Contact

Mednarodni filmski festival Stoptrik

Ob železnici 8, SI-2000 Maribor

http://stoptrikiff.eu/

stoptrikfestival@gmail.com

Phone386 (0) 2 300 7870

Organised byZavod Iskra

Frequencyannual

Festival dates1.10.2015 - 4.10.2015

Stoptrik International Film Festival was launched in 2011 by Pekarna Magdalena Network. It is the only European film festival dedicated solely to stop motion animation, featuring both screenings of recent productions as well as selected retrospectives. Via workshops and panel discussions, it is also presenting and developing the various approaches to the stop motion animation technique. In short, it is "an annual celebration of all things photographed one painstaking frame at a time", with stoptrik being the Serbo-Croatian word for stop motion video techniques.

International not only programme-wise, Stoptrik has an international presence also as an event, and is taking place in Maribor, Slovenia, and in two additional Polish cities. This cross-sectoral collaboration enables effective festival organization and also opens up a very diverse stream of initiatives and programming ideas.

Background

In 2011, two Polish film-studies graduates were staying in as volunteers for Pekarna Magdalena Network and out of their stay there, the Stoptrik International Film Festival was born. The second editions of the festival was already extended to the city of Niepołomice in Poland, and later the fourth one to yet another Polish city, Bielsko-Biała.

While the first edition of the festival was still more of a guerilla enterprise, the second one has benefited greatly from Maribor being the European Capital of Culture 2012 and has since than been growing in terms recognition, festival activities and programme scope. The main venues screenings, at least in Maribor that is, are Gustaf Hall, Pekarna, Kino Udarnik Maribor and Vetrinjski dvor.

StopTrik 2014 Intro by Stoptrik IFF on YouTube

Festival programme

The festival is focused on presenting the current stop motion productions, which is a technically very varied field of puppet film, 'claymation', object or photography manipulation, animation of loose materials such as salt or sand, pixilation, traditional cut-out and many other techniques such as animation of lights, fire, yarns, threads, etc. The screened films are chosen from all over the world (there were more than a hundred of them in 2014), and some of the up until now highlights include the films The Chronicle of Oldřich (Rudolf Šmíd, CZ), Sleight of Hand (Michael Cusak, AUS), Boles (Špela Čadež, SLO), Recycled (Lei Lei & Thomas Sauvin, CHN), Papa (Girlin-Bassovskaja, ES), etc.

All of the above films have gotten one or another award in the different competition categories of the festival, be it the Grand Prix Award for the best animation film, or the so called Borderland Award, which is given to films that transgress the stop motion techniques by combining them with other animation techniques, or maybe the Best Slavic Stop Motion. While the latter is an award given by the Festival Committee, others are chosen by the audiences at each festival location.

Each year, there are also screenings of archive materials, as for example a selection of Ukrainian clay animations, a review of Slovene classics filmed between 1952 and 1962 by Triglav film and a retrospective of the Polish stop motion pioneer Ladislas Starevich.

Workshops and other activities

The festival has a rich side programme, with pre-events, discussions, video mapping, concerts and intensive workshops of stop motion animation, which was in 2014 led by Leon Vidmar.

A very curios feature of the festival is its sub-programme called Trik Show, which is a series of Youtube videos showing the techniques used in producing various stop-motion works. This feature is a way of reaching and also connecting the global community of people dealing in this field of art and craft, as it s otherwise very dispersed and even elusive.

Collaboration and international presence

Of the Slovene institutions, the prime partners of Stoptrik are the festival Animateka and the Udarnik Institute.

Some of the international partners are Krakow Film Festival (PL), Etiuda&Anima IFF (PL), Supertoon Festival (HR), PAF (CZ), O!PLA (PL), ShortShorts Film Festival & Asia (JAP), Primaanima (HU), Se-ma-for Film Festival (PO), Laguna Film Festival (MX), Notfall Film Festival (NE), Ofafa Film Festival (PO), Ottomani Laboratori (IT), Nukufilm (ES).

Stoptrik is sometimes also being hosted at other festivals and elsewhere, going even as far as to Taiwan, where they were lecturing at the Tainan National University of the Arts.

See also

• Pekarna Magdalena Network
• Kino Udarnik Maribor
• Animateka International Animated Film Festival

External links

• Stoptrik International Film Festival website
• Aa article on the festival in Krakow Post