LINOLEUM 2019 international festival of topical animation and media arts will take place on September 4-8 in Kyiv. Except international, Ukrainian and commercial animation competitions, the festival program will consist of experimental animation and video art screenings, children’s animation, theme selections, a retrospective of Ukrainian animation, screenings of programs from international festivals, and educational workshops. The project will be implemented with the support of Ukrainian Cultural Fund.
Each year LINOLEUM forms a theme expressing the festival’s concept and providing certain thematic beacons for its participants. The topic of this year’s festival is COMMON GROUND. Our time offers a wide range of opportunities and freedom of choice for practically anything. In its turn, this freedom provokes a question: how do people divided into numerous communities due to religious diversity, various political stands and outlooks continue co-existing without conflicts? The COMMON GROUND theme is searching for answers to these and other questions looking for and finding overlaps and also decreasing distances between people. Today the art of animation, working on the territory of the imagined, becomes a field of opportunities to work out common meanings and to help people find a common language.
Apart from the theme, the festival presents an official poster. It was developed by Gustaf Holtenäs, a Swedish independent artist working with illustrations, animation, painting, music and storytelling. His work, Rapin* music video for Jenny Wilson, participated in last year’s competition program of the festival and received a special mention from the jury.
Well, the idea came from the theme of course, which is the “common ground” - to learn to live with someone who is completely opposite to you and possibility to experience different forms of co-existence. Common ground can be explained as a form when one side dominates over the second one, and the second one lets it happen. So one way to adapt this to animation would be all the different cultural styles of animation there is (are). And that was my approach. So I limited myself to do five different drawing styles. At first I thought of doing very stereotypical ones, like classic Manga, classic Disney and assign the styles to their nationalities of origin. But that doesn’t really fit the contemporary animation scene anymore, cause everything is very culturally mixed. So instead I focused on doing five styles that somehow represented different animation techniques. And do them In styles that are common in the Linoleum selection. I did one pencilled drawn manga character (the green one), one stop motion figure (the doll), one ruffly sketched guy (the white one), one 3D rendered figure (the yellow one), and one digitally airbrushed graphical design character (the blue one). And they all have their own city from which they came (shown in the background of the poster).
Just a reminder: the open call for applications to the competition program started on March 4. During this time, we have received over 2,700 applications from about 80 countries. The leaders by the number of applications are animators from the US, the UK and France.
Besides, the term for applications to Ukrainian competition program has been extended to June 28. You can find the form to fill out at this link.
The list of international competition nominees will be announced in early July.
There are some pleasant news about the locations where LINOLEUM 2019 will be taking place. This year all screenings of competition and out-of-competition programs will take place in an iconic cultural space of the capital, and this is no exaggeration – in Zhovten cinema (26, Kostyantynivska str.). The first tickets will be up for sale in mid-July. All educational programs will be held in IZONE creative space at 8, Naberezhno-Luhova street. The program will be traditionally divided into lectures and workshops on media art and animation. Thanks to this year’s support from Ukrainian Cultural Fund the entrance to the educational program will be free of charge.
LINOLEUM 2019 will take place with the support of Ukrainian Cultural Fund, Ukrainian State Film Agency, Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and Austrian Cultural Forum in Kyiv.
The festival organizer is Animagrad animation studio.
