After two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced him to a fully digital edition in 2020 and to another hybrid (both online and onsite) in 2021, the Annecy International Animation Film Festival is finally back to its usual form. Public, professionals in the sector, established filmmakers and emerging talents will be able to meet again in the city of Haute-Savoie, from June 13 to 18. Six days during which short and feature films from around the world will be presented, analyzed and discussed. Among the long formats, ten will be in official competition and ten others will compete in the Contrechamp category, whose vocation is to highlight original films and new signatures.
Each year, the selection is tough. According to Marcel Jean, artistic delegate of the festival for ten years, it is also revealed, over the editions, always more complex. And this because of an exponential level of quality. “More and more countries are able to produce and direct films with the benefit of highly trained teams and increasingly daring techniques, explains the delegate. Faced with this extremely powerful offer, we have to make choices that both take our favorites into account, but can also reflect, both in form and content, the major international trends in animated creation. »
Among the twenty feature films in competition this year, more than a quarter engage in a work of memory, reopening the pages of our collective history through intimate stories, sometimes even autobiographical. This is the case for Alain Ughetto who, nine years after his heartbreaking Jasmine, comes back with Forbidden to dogs and Italians. An evocation in modeling clay of the journey made by the grandfather, Luigi Ughetto who, at the beginning of the XXe century, left the family cradle in northern Italy and crossed the Alps to reach France.
The historical current also crosses Nayola, Portuguese José Miguel Ribeiro, who retraces the fate of three generations of women scarred by war in Angola; or Charlotte, the 2D film by Eric Warin and Tahir Rana, on the very short life of the German Jewish painter Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943), who died in Auschwitz at the age of 26. In a lighter register, Le Petit Nicolas: what are we waiting for to be happy?, by Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre, is also making history. That of the friendship and professional complicity that united Goscinny and Sempé, whose line reproduced in animation brings us back, in a very documented way, to the origin of the work.
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