The jury members of this year's LINOLEUM International Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival include nominees of the major international film festivals and Oscar, as well as industry representatives collaborating with Netflix and HBO. The festival will run between September 1st and 5th in Kyiv. This year's theme of LINOLEUM is PRESENCE. INTIMACY. TOUCH. It explores the world during the pandemic when the usual order of things fell apart, the physical presence is nearly a rarity, the intimacy is a forbidden entertainment and touching is a mortal danger.
Independent illustrator, animator, and director Hanna Rybak tried to give her perspective on this topic, creating a visual identity for LINOLEUM 2021 - a poster presented earlier and the festival's official trailer.
The LINOLEUM 2021 winners will be traditionally defined in three sections - International competition (45 films), Ukrainian competition (10 films) and Commissioned films competition (24 films) - by the professional jury board that include filmmakers, producers, curators, animators from all over the world.
Each competition section has a separate jury board.
The International competition winners will be defined by: the Croatian director Veljko Popović, whose films won over 70 international awards including those in Ottawa, Zagreb, Hiroshima and LINOLEUM 2018;
Fabian Driehorst – German producer, Fabian&Fred studio co-founder, participant of numerous international events, board member of AG Animationsfilm;
Polish director, animator and scriptwriter Tomek Popakul. His film Acid Rain won 35 awards and was selected by 90 film festivals, was on the long Oscar list. His last work is the short hybrid animation Moon created for HBO pandemic anthology At Home.
The Commissioned films competition will feature promo videos, trailers, music videos, social and educational films. The best ones will be chosen by: Israeli filmmaker and illustrator living in Amsterdam Daphna Awadish, who specializes in documentaries and whose films won a number of awards such as the Best Animation Award - Jerusalem Film Festival and the Fantastic Award in Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film;
Visual artist from Rotterdam Alice Saey who focuses on poetic and graphic forms on narration in the field of design and film. Her music videos travelled the world and were awarded at festivals such as Annecy, Ottawa, Klik!. Last year, she won the Linoleum Commissioned Films competition;
Nazar Zhytkevych - project manager at Fedoriv agency, creative producer and screenwriter of animation and video projects in the past with ten years of experience. Throughout his career, Nazar collaborated with big and small brands, and could feel the value and uniqueness of each of them.
The Ukrainian competition will be judged by: Kyrylo Marikutsa – Co-founder and director of Kyiv International Short Film Festival (KISFF) which is the largest annual short film event in Ukraine. Since 2015, Kyrylo has also been working on the KyivMusicFilm project. This distribution company focuses on the organization of thematic festivals and theatrical distribution of documentaries about music and culture;
Tory Polska – designer of animation films who is now working on the development of visual language for a cartoon in Netflix studio;
Stas Santimov – designer and illustrator who shifted to animation from GameDev. He is the author of animated web-comic Motion Stories, music videos for DK and Eluvium, participant of The Preschool Poets: An Animated Film Series project. He is the Ukrainian competition winner at LINOLEUM 2017.
In 2021, LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival will run in a hybrid format: Competition and special screenings will take place offline in Zhovten cinema theatre in Kyiv, while the education section will be streamed online on the Youtube channel and Facebook page of the festival.
The festival passes are now available for purchase. They will be valid throughout the festival and give access to all the screenings at Zhovten cinema theatre. The Festival Pass costs 500 uah, and the price will not change. You can buy it only online at concert.ua. The number of passes is limited.
