Made between 1959–2019, these international films provide original takes on fairytales and folk legends from Hungary, Niger, Chile and elsewhere.
Optional visit to Festival Exhibitions
To bring your group, please contact chloe@bfmaf.org.
Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles
Part-pagan ritual, part-fairytale, this dance around the Maypole produced by venerable English progressive rock stalwarts Jethro Tull is a fantastical, psychedelic happening. With music and spoken word taken from the group’s 1973 album A Passion Play, the film was made as a visual component of their elaborately-produced tour for the album. As such, it is rarely considered on its own outside of the band’s context, but the short film is an exhilarating and humourous work that touches on many aspects of fairytale and folklore.
Busójáráskor
Busójáráskor is an ethnographic documentary on the celebration of Busójárás, a six-day festival in the southern town of Mohács, Hungary held each February to mark the end of Carnival season and the death of winter. Busójárás is a tradition of the Šokci people, a South Slavic ethnic group spanning parts of Croatia, Serbia and Hungary who self-identify as Croats. The celebration’s mythology looks back to the 16th and 17th centuries, when the region was under Ottoman rule. The legend states that the Šokci left the town to avoid Turkish troops, living instead in the swamps and forest. One night, an old man suddenly appeared, telling them to carve scary masks and weapons, and that a knight would arrive to tell them when it was time to storm the troops. Wearing animal pelts and carved wooden masks, armed with pikes and spears, and carrying noise-makers, the Šokci stormed the Turks who ran away in fear.
The Cat
The Cat is an interesting meeting of the Yugoslavian animation studio Zagreb Film and Rome’s Corona Cinematografica, a prominent producer of documentaries, animation and experimental films. The short film was directed by Zlatko Bourek, one of the prized animators in the Zagreb School, a term for a group of Yugoslav animators whose works of social satire and modernist design became inter- nationally recognised from the late 1950s through the 1970s. A day-glo adaptation of Aesop’s ‘Venus and the Cat’, The Cat holds many hallmarks of psychedelic-era art and design: shocking colours, marbled or textured backgrounds and Aubrey Beardsley-esque figures, both nude and clothed.
The Ring of King Koda
Moustapha Alassane—a pioneering African filmmaker born in Benin and living in Niger for most of his life—came to cinema with an already-developed flair for storytelling. According to writer Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, “His extreme talent for drawing and his quest for invention prompted him, before he even knew what cinema was, to organize a one-man exhibition in which he projected his color drawings for his audience by using transparent cellophane wrappers from cigarette packets.”
With the support of the Institut Français
Strange Creatures
“Nothing could alter the calm of the forest… or so it seemed”. Strange Creatures is a beautifully stylistic papier-mâché animation which can be understood as a modern fable. The film is the first collaboration between Cristóbal Léon—who has made a number of successful short and feature films over the past years in collaboration with Joaquín Cociña—and illustrator and animator Cristina Sitja. It is an adaptation of Sitja’s 2014 children’s book of the same title (Extrañas Criaturas in Spanish) in which she wanted to talk about the effects of human actions on nature.