A film night with your parents

No longer misunderstood! Family drama comes to Student Competition 3

Adil Sylqa

Remember the times when you bonded with your parents over animated cartoons you demanded they needed to be seen? Together!? And they happily agreed to, otherwise you wouldn’t shut up. It is time to revisit this connection in our latest edition of Anibar. Short features appearing in this session will examine the perplexing relationships between coming of age kids and the ambivalent attitude of their parents.

Program starts off with a graduation project from Anna Ottlik, a young animator from Hungary, whose film Primek sends us in the childhood memories of a man that seems to have a lot of regrets. Very early in his life he develops an interest in math, specifically in prime numbers who are rare and as we know they can’t be divided with other numbers. In a way, this is how he wants his relationship with his dad to be, a reciprocal undivided attention between themselves but things go awry once he realizes his younger brother has broken into his prime number.

What comes next is a nonfiction reflection on being out of the closet. One of the first questions a child who finds himself in the margins of a society naturally asks is, does it get better as I grow up? Answer is never the same, and this is what the following feature Mom’s Clothes sets out to accomplish in its short but captivating combination of image and confession. Drawing inspiration from his personal childhood, director Jordan Wong has constructed vivid images that speak to the audience in their own way.

The third and longest feature of this program brings us the moving story of a young man who emigrated to Syria to find his calling. Tracing Addai, an award-winning animated documentary by Esther Niemeier, depicts the true story of Addai told by his mother, whom is left devastated when she realizes her son has disappeared voluntarily from her life without a single goodbye. With the thoughts of her failure as a mother creeping in, she is on the hunt for the truth. What did really happen? How is it possible for a mother to know her son so little?
Soon, an answer arrives in the form of email. “I didn’t leave to get away from you, remember that.”
Shortly after she receives another message, this time from his friend. “One thing you have to believe me, we left with good intentions.” Make sure to not miss this journey to Hell, it will leave a mark on you, as it did on us.

Moving forward with the program, we meet with two projects from Prague’s famous FAMU art school.
Apart presents narrators real experiences combined with animated sequences reconstructing painful situations, looking into the thoughts of three young people untimely exposed to death. By using techniques of both live-action and animation, the director Diana Cam Van Nguyen has used the hybrid genre of animated documentary to explore one’s own past while creating a strong emotional dimension at the same time. A recent winner of Best Czech Experimental Documentary at the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival, Apart will be among the favorites here too.

The closing film of this session is a combination of stop-motion, documentary film-making and painterly figure project by Daria Kashcheeva called Daughter. This unique style portrays the urgency of human experience through the viewpoint of a hand-held camera. “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 para-documentary nature” says Kashcheeva.
Daughter deals with the relationship of duality between family members, a passionate closeness yet an agonizing distance, a consequence of miscommunicated love.  As a child, you always find yourself retreating into your own world which grows bigger by the day and suddenly is too big of a gap to climb. Hiding your pain until it goes away or coming through with your feelings before it is too late, is the battle Daughter must fight within herself.

There is plenty to chew on in this session of Anibar X, a great opportunity to invite your family along. Finally, there is an event in the city that going out with your parents won’t feel out of place. They will appreciate it, we’re sure of that. See you soon!