Robert Bradbrook's Home Road Movies won Best European Film. © Finetake/ Channel 4/ Ace 2001.

As a body of work, Kucia's films were the most consistently fascinating and challenging, sometimes frustratingly so. Literally dark and ambiguously suggestive, they ranged from the early Powrot (The Return, 1972) to Strojenie instrumentowmy (Tuning Instruments, 2000), which received a Special Jury Prize in the International Competition. Addressing the audience before a screening, Kucia said that, while he certainly didn't plan his trajectory in advance, he realizes in retrospect that he has been making one long film for thirty years. He feels that he's now reached the end of this phase and he speculated that his next film will be quite different — perhaps a comedy. (This was said jokingly, but it will be interesting to see what direction his work in fact takes.)

John R. Dilworth takes a break from all the festival action. He was the subject of a career retrospective this year. Courtesy of David Fine.

As has often been noted, I Castelli Animati is a much smaller festival than such institutions as Annecy and Ottawa, but the intimate scale is in many ways an asset, fostering a familial atmosphere that, at least for me, added to the enjoyment. And, as always, there was plenty to see. In addition to the retrospectives mentioned above, the program included 36 films in the International Competition and 10 in the Italian Competition, as well as some 30 films screening out of competition in the showcase. There was also a selection of Web animation, series, commercials, and the winners of a special competition conducted in conjunction with Videotecnica magazine. For anyone wishing to spend some time looking at non-moving images, there were two exhibitions, one featuring a prodigious collection of Bozzettiana, and the other displaying a selection of drawings used in the production of the animated feature, Johan Padan a la discoverta de le americhe (Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas), based on the play by Dario Fo.

See clips from Cathal Gaffney's Give Up Yer Aul Sins and In Between by Nicole Hewitt. Both screened at I Castelli this year. Give Up Yer Aul Sins © Brown Bag Films and In Between © Zagreb Films.

The films are all screened in a single theater, the charming Cinema Modernissimo, with categories interspersed, rather than segregated, and the occasional panel discussion thrown in for good measure. The proceedings were moderated, as always, by the festival's artistic director, the indefatigable Luca Raffaelli, who was as enthusiastic introducing the last screening of the day at 11:30 p.m. as he had been at the first screening more than twelve hours before. When asked about his programming strategy, Luca explained that he remembered attending screenings in his youth where he would sit through 2 1/2 hours of cerebral Polish animation without a break. "The director made a short film — it wasn't meant to be seen [as one component in a homogeneous sequence]. It's important to mix things up, to have a balance between the crazy films and the serious ones."