One last peculiarity of the Festival must be mentioned: no other festival that I know of embraces such a wide definition of animation. KROK shows not only a fine selection of artful animation films, but also such a variety of parallel programs (discussions, music, satire, dance, eating, drinking, museums, etc.) that none of the other art forms receive short shrift. KROK is itself an animation!

In order to be a little more concrete, and to offer the reader an insight into daily occurrences at the Festival, I now take the liberty of using my modest, and naturally very subjective, diary notes to give a picture of life on the ship. The following is definitely not what an official news reporter would say about the Festival.

Monday, August 11
By chance I met my friend Paul Bush from London (Still Life With a Small Cup, Great Britain, 1996) at the Zurich airport. We arrive on the same plane in Kiev, where Galina and Alexander meet us. After Chris Shepherd (Broken Jaw, GB, 1997), Pedro Serrazina (The Tale About the Cat and the Moon, Portugal, 1995), and Stephanie Dinklebach (The Imperial Message, Ireland, 1996) arrive a little while later, on a flight direct from London, a festival bus brings us to the Kiev harbor, where the ship "Marshall Koshevoy" is already waiting for us.

Registration and the opening reception takes place on the deck. Here we meet for the first time the more than 300 Festival guests. The weather is mild, and with the darkness approaching, the moon bathes the whole scenery of the Festival with crystalline light. The opening reception dissolves seamlessly into a merry dance under the open starry sky.

oTTo Alder on board. Photo © Paul Bush.

The cinema theater on the boat offered a repeat screening of the opening film program, which had already been shown that afternoon in a Kiev cinema to some 600 viewers. The high point of the program is the new film by Andrei Khrzhanovsky, Long Voyages. Tonino Guerra, who for many years was Federico Fellini's scriptwriter, collaborated with Khrzhanovsky on writing it. The film is based on Fellini's sketches. Maestro, the hero of the film, goes to sea in order to reach a magnificent island. Tonino Guerra, who is a guest on the KROK ship, abducts us into the world of Fellini's pictures of women. The film seems as if it were specially made just for the KROK Festival.

The sudden vibration of the ship, and the dance floor, signals to us that KROK has set sail, and left Kiev under a clear, starry night. In the bar, in the cafe and on the deck, people are dancing, singing and conversing until the night passes over into a new day.

Tuesday, August 12
A gentle Russian woman's voice summons me from my dreams to remind me that breakfast is being served, and at 10 o'clock the second competition program will screen. The soft garden chairs deployed in the cinema fit in quite well with the gentle rocking of the ship, and carry us away into Flat World, the new film by the British Daniel Greaves, whose 1991 Manipulation won an Oscar. The technically innovative and narratively wild film about Matt Phlatt, his cat and his greedy fish, sent the overcrowded and completely overheated theater into peals of laughter. Although the message of the film (television is boring and only promotes idiocy) isn't anything new, the audience gladly let it be repeated through this brilliantly animated, highly enjoyable film.

In contrast, the film Under the Waxing Moon by the Belgian Hans Spilliaert, which equates the massive shipment of cattle to slaughter in a rather questionable way to the holocaust, jerked the audience sharply back to reality. To show after that, in the same program, other funny films, like Alexander Tatarsky's Pilot Brothers , simply didn't work, and placed an unreasonable demand on everyone.

The selection for the competition was made by Yuri Norstein, Natalya Loukinykh and Boris Pavlov from Russia, Jiri Kubicek from the Czech Republic, Svetlana Kutsenko and Alexander Shpilyuk from the Ukraine, and Kurine Zereteli from Georgia. From the roughly 380 films submitted, only 120 were shown in the competition.

Approaching clouds, rain and fog drive the Festival guests below the ship's decks. There they could listen to Michael Aldashin playing guitar, accompanying Ivan Maximov's singing. Today there are parties both in the bar and the cafe on the lower decks.