If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from Priit Pärn's Breakfast on the Grass, which won the Tampere Grand

"It's incredible! The Tampere Short Film Festival has a wider program of animation than some of the actual animation festivals," said one of the first time visitors I met at the XXIX Tampere International Short Film Festival in March.

Tampere is a traditional industrial town in Finland, Northern Europe, inhabited by 175,000 people and covered with a lot of snow in March. It's not the most likely place to find an almost 30 year old annual short film festival, which is often referred to as one of the leaders in its field in Europe, and even the world. The name of the small town 15 kilometers away, Nokia, is without a doubt known much better, though for other reasons. Finland has the highest density of mobile phones in the world, and as a result, one can get the daily festival program on his phone screen as a text message.

A Special Festival
The first-time visitor's observation is correct: Tampere has a strong animation tradition. Other European short film festivals have different kinds of preferences. For instance, Clermont-Ferrand in France is the place for short fiction and Oberhausen in Germany is known for experimental films. Tampere presented Japanese animation as early as 1983 with the presence of Renzo Kinoshita, founder of the now well known Hiroshima Animation Festival. Other retrospectives in the '80s were dedicated to Estonian Priit Pärn, Yugoslavian Bordo, Polish-French Jan Lenica, Czechoslovakian Jan Svankmajer and pinscreen animators Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. In the '90s we have seen programs from Estonian Rein Raamat, Russian Yuri Norstein, the British Brothers Quay, Japan's Kihachiro Kawamoto and Osamu Tezuka, Aardman Animations, Russian Andrei Khrzahanovski and Czech Jiri Trinka, not to forget Tex Avery.

In the days of the Cold War, Finland's proximity to Eastern Europe was a strong suite for the Tampere Film Festival. Though a western country, Finland had good relations with the Soviet Union and this helped to bring many films not seen anywhere else to Tampere. This was especially the case with the international competition. Priit Pärn's masterpiece Eine murul (Breakfast on the Grass) began its successful tour of world festivals by capturing the Tampere Grand Prix 1988. This is perhaps the only time in my life that I've been at a festival where no one complained that the wrong film had received the prize -- the decision was unanimous. In 1997 Tampere screened a major retrospective of Chuck Jones, which was honored by the participation of the maestro himself. The rest of the Americas were not forgotten either. In that very same festival we saw the Cuban animated feature Vampiros en la Habana (Vampires in Havana, 1985) by Juan Padrón and a retrospective of Argentinean animation.

Frédéric Back's classic The Man Who Planted Trees © SRC.

Retrospectives and Special Screenings
This year's festival ran from March 10-14 and presented the films of Canadian Frédéric Back, plus a major retrospective of Russian animation from the '90s. It also included a special screening of films by Russian Garri Bardin.

Both Back and Bardin participated in the festival. Garri Bardin commented to his audience that he hadn't seen so many fine films as in Tampere for a long time. "I myself even wonder at how much I've done!" Bardin showed his sense of humor several times, both in and outside of his films. When asked about the role of humor in his films, Bardin said it's a necessity: "Without humor one couldn't do animation now in Russia."

Frédéric Back, widely beloved for his film L'homme Qui Plantait des Arbres (The Man Who Planted Trees, 1987), charmed the audience by telling about his own farm in Canada, purchased 30 years ago. There, with his family he planted 15,000 trees, and will plant 10,000 more this spring. "There are never enough trees," Back said in his humble and firm manner.