06/06/2019 - Two movies from the Prague-based film school will take part in Annecy's Graduation Films competition section

Two Czech short films made at the Prague film school FAMU will be competing in the Graduation Films section of the Official Selection of the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which is set to take place from 10-15 June.

World-premiering at Annecy, Daughter by Daria Kashcheeva, whose film To Accept came out on top in the Cannes Nespresso Talents competition in 2017, is a non-linear story about a daughter and a father. The official synopsis reads: in a hospital room, the Daughter recalls a childhood moment when, as a little girl, she tried to share her experience with an injured bird with her Father. A moment of misunderstanding and a lost embrace has stretched into many years, all the way to this hospital room, until the moment when a windowpane breaks under the impact of a little bird. 

“My film’s key theme is the father-daughter relationship, a very personal and important topic to me,” says Kashcheeva. “In order to draw viewers into my world of memories, I made the film with a hand-held-camera feel, big close-ups, low depth of field and a lot of motion, lending it an authentic immediacy and a paradocumentary nature. To show the characters’ emotions with facial expressions, I painted the eyes directly on the puppets’ faces, giving them a lot of life and an intense way of expressing the characters’ emotions.”

Kascheeva wrote, animated and directed the film, which was lensed by herself and Bargav Sridhar, and edited by Alexander Kashcheev, while the score was composed by Petr Vrba. It was co-produced by Zuzana Roháčová, from FAMU, and Martin Vandas, of MAUR Film.

Meanwhile, Diana Cam Van Nguyen's animated documentary Apart world-premiered at the Ji.hlava IDFF, where it won the Award for Best Czech Experimental Film, and went on to screen in Rotterdam's Voices section. After several other festival appearances, including GoShort in Nijmegen and Animafest Zagreb, it is now a finalist for the BAFTA Student Film Awards.

This short film about life after the loss of a loved one deals with a difficult topic, using techniques of both live action and hand-painted animated film. Real-life experiences of the narrators are combined with animated sequences reconstructing painful situations, looking into the thoughts of three young people prematurely exposed to death. 

The script was co-written by Nguyen and Lukáš Janičík, while Kryštof Melka served as the DoP. Janičík also edited the film, which was animated by Nguyen and Magdalena Kvasničková, while Viera Marinová took care of the music and sound. The movie was produced at FAMU and is being brought to Annecy by Karolína Davidová's company, 13ka.