The third edition of ANIMARIO brings the best international animation back to Madrid

• This year’s edition of the Madrid International Festival of Contemporary Animation is a hybrid event: screenings and activities will take place at the Cineteca Madrid (Film Archive) and much of the festival programme will be available through the Filmin platform
• Of the 21 short films that have been selected for the Competitive Section, 13 have been directed by women.  Three of them are world premières and the other 18 are being screened for the first time in the city of Madrid
• The festival will present the Spanish première of ‘The Doll's Breath’ by the Quay Brothers, produced by Christopher Nolan; retrospectives of Thomas Renoldner, Sofía Carrillo and Chintis Lundgren; and the ‘Tócame’ (Touch Me) cycle, which addresses the more physical side of animation
• Sponsored by the Plaza Río 2 shopping centre, the festival will include online animation workshops and the ANIMARIO Plaza Río 2 Challenge, which will invite the public to put their creativity to the test, with the animator Cesarlinga as master of ceremonies
• The festival will kick-off with the Spanish preview of ‘Homeless Home’ by Alberto Vázquez, winner of the Animario-Plaza Rio 2 award for animation production in 2019, while the closing ceremony will feature the Spanish première of ‘The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks’

Cineteca Madrid (Film Archive) and Matadero Madrid, both cultural centres run by the City Council’s Department of Culture, Tourism and Sport and managed by Madrid Destino, with the support of the Plaza Río 2 shopping centre, located opposite Matadero and alongside the Madrid Río Park, present the third edition of ANIMARIO, Madrid’s International Festival of Contemporary Animation. The festival’s in-person activities will take place between 15 and 18 October 2020 and its online programme will then continue until the 25th of the same month.

In a year dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and of course taking all the necessary safety measures, ANIMARIO is determined not to lose what is a key element of any festival: the physical presence of the audience. For the third year in a row, the festival’s programme at Cineteca Madrid (Film Archive) will attract devotees of a discipline that is becoming increasingly popular on our screens: animation. In the words of the exhibition's curator, Carolina López, “considering the audiovisual world as a whole, the fact that most animation productions have been able to go ahead is a sure guarantee that this year’s edition will be full of interesting and new content”.

ANIMARIO 2020 will feature screenings and in-person activities in different spaces within Cineteca Madrid (Film Archive) and Matadero Madrid and, for the first time this year, the festival will offer online screenings through the Filmin platform. This hybrid formula will allow the festival to reach a larger audience by offering people the opportunity to enjoy the films both on the big screen and at home. The public will be able to enjoy the Official Competitive Short Film Section in the screening room and on the VOD platform, as well as the festival’s retrospective sections, the opening conference, film presentations, workshops, and talks in which a number of filmmakers will share their creative processes.

21 competing short films
The competitive section of ANIMARIO is growing in size and will include 21 titles this year, three of which will be world premières while the other 18 are being screened for the first time in Madrid. Together they represent a cross-section of the best independent animation filmmaking. More than 100 works were submitted to this open call for entries for the Animario Award for Best Short Film which is endowed with 5,000 euros. The members of the jury will be the Mexican animator and filmmaker Sofía Carrillo, the film critic and director of Sofilm magazine, Alberto Lechuga, and the animation producer and co-founder of Uniko Estudios, Iván Miñambres. 

The selection includes such outstanding award-winning films as Alexandre Siqueira's 'Purpleboy', the story of a boy-plant with no defined sex; Geoffroy de Crécy’s ‘Empty Places’, with its elegant empty spaces; and ‘The Physics of Sorrow’, a story of life behind the Iron Curtain by Bulgarian-Canadian Theodore Ushev. There is also room for such discoveries as ‘Portrait of Suzanne’ by Izabela Plucińska, based on a story by Roland Topor and animated in plasticine, or ‘The Coin’, the latest film by Siqui Song whose previous short film ‘Sister’ won last year’s Jury's Mention. Spain is well represented by ‘Mad in Xpain’ by Madrid-born Coque Riobóo, ‘Rutina: La Prohibición’ (Routine: The Prohibition) by Sam Orti, ‘Esfinge Urbana’ (Urban Sphinx) by María Lorenzo, ‘Beelzebub’ by César Díaz and ‘YO’ (ME) by Begoña Aróstegui. 

A new feature this year is the creation of a non-competitive section for films made by students. The curator tells us: “In recent years, the quality and number of short films produced in schools has grown exponentially”.

The ANIMARIO festival will open with the Spanish preview of ‘Homeless Home’, by Alberto Vázquez, a film that won the Animario-Plaza Rio 2 production award in the 2019 edition and recently received a prize at the prestigious Annecy festival. The screening of the film will be followed by a master class by Vázquez, who will look back on his career and present images from 'Unicorn Wars', his new feature film which is currently in full production. Alberto Vázquez is one of the most prominent names in the world of animation, and his films have been seen at such prestigious festivals as Cannes, Clermont Ferrand and Annecy. The festival will close with the Madrid première of the feature film ‘The Nose or the Conspiracy of Mavericks’ by legendary Russian animator Andrey Khrzhanovsky. 

Cycles, retrospectives and premières at Cineteca Madrid and on Filmin
The body and the tactile seen through animation and inspired by literature and the performing arts, is one of the central themes of this edition with premières, retrospectives and a cycle entitled ‘Tócame’ (Touch Me) which celebrates the sense of touch through films full of surreal environments and choreographies, most of which have been created by women. Humour and sensuality conveyed through fantastic and diverse worlds will be to the fore in works by Michaela Pavlatova, Suzan Piit, Yokiro Mizushiri, Jean-Charles Mbotti Malolo, Renée Zhan, Camila Karter and Jan Švankmajer.

ANIMARIO will showcase complete retrospectives of the work of three animators, Mexico’s Sofia Carrillo, the Estonian Chintis Lundgren, and Thomas Renoldner, from Vienna. As a result, the public will be able to enjoy Carrillo's exquisite stop-motion puppet films, Lundgren's raw lines and hilarious humour, and Renoldner's experimentation in different forms and formats. In addition to screening their films, and to allow us to gain a better understanding of the authors, ANIMARIO will be showing a video created exclusively for the festival in which the three directors will explain their unique creative processes.

Participatory and family activities

ANIMARIO has prepared several programmes for families at the Cineteca (Film Archive) and on Filmin, as well as a workshop led by independent animator Laura Ginés. The films that have been selected are medium-length films of great artistic sensitivity like ‘La Vie de Château', a French production in which a girl is sent off to live with her uncle, a grumpy guard at the palace of Versailles, and ‘Zog’, a British production by the creators of 'The Gruffalo', set in a school for dragons.

The Animario-Plaza Rio 2 online challenge will be ‘Naturaleza en Stop Motion’ (Nature in Stop Motion), an invitation to young and old alike to create a work in stop motion animation. Audiences of all ages will be invited to participate, aided by a tutorial created exclusively for ANIMARIO by Cesarlinga, the Spanish animator who has worked with Wes Anderson, Tim Burton and other well-known directors, and who is the author of multi-award winning short films such as 'Zepo' and 'Muedra'.

ANIMARIO 2020
MADRID INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF CONTEMPORARY ANIMATION

In-person programme from 15 to 18 October at Cineteca Madrid (Film Archive)

Online programme from 15 to 25 October on Filmin

Tickets on sale from 1 October at cinetecamadrid.com

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For more information: comunicacion@mataderomadrid.org