It is hard to believe that the Monstra Animated Film Festival in Lisbon, Portugal is only 8 years old because each year the festival leaves me with a lifetime of memories. The 2009 edition (March 9 – 15, 2009) moved downtown from its prevision location so that it could reach more of the community. The experiment worked well, with good-sized audiences for the screenings. The majority of the screenings took place in the lavish Art Deco style Cinema Sao Jorge. The cinema, built between 1947 and 1950 by the British Rank Organization to showcase their films, was once the largest movie palace on the Iberian Peninsula.
There are records of Chinese residents in Lisbon from as early as 1540 and to honor this segment of the population the Museu do Oriente (Museum of Oriental Art) was opened in the heart of the Asian Community last year. This year it was the ideal site for respected Japanese abstract animator Maya Yonnesho’s 3-day workshop. She and a group of students “toured” Lisbon via two wall sized pictographs in the museum, which they used as a starting point to create their film Lisbon Mix which was filmed all over the city. The finished film, capturing the sights and sounds of the city through Maya and her student’s eyes, was screened on closing night. Along with a retrospective of Maya’s films there were showings of Chinese animator Li-jun Sun’s Zhang Ga! and Through The Moebus Strip by Clenn Chaika from China and the United States.
The Museu da Marioneta (Puppet Museum) in conjunction with Monstra mounted an extensive exhibit of puppets and sets from Jose Miguel Ribeiro’s new film Passeio De Domingo (Sunday Drive). There were also drawings and photographs used in the making of the 20-minute film, which was conceived in Lisbon, built in Montemor, filmed in Belgium and France and with post production taking place in the Netherlands. I especially enjoyed the visual representations at the museum of the route that Jose Miguel traveled as he went to these countries working with different teams of professionals in their three different languages. It was amazing to see the attention to detail that was taken with each character and set.
I have been anxiously awaiting this film because I am a large fan of his earlier film, The Suspect, which won more International awards than any other Portuguese film up to the present time. When Nik and I screened The Suspect as part of our Ideas In Animation series our audience was delighted with the puppet animation that tells the story of four people on a train that may have a serial killer on board. Several years ago Nik and I visited Jose Miguel at his workshop in Montemor and saw the first puppets being created, so I was eager to see the film, which was screened at the closing night ceremony. Passeio De Domingo lived up to my expectations and I am sure we will all have ample opportunity to see this touching humorous story of a family’s Sunday drive that turns into a road trip.
The Museu da Marioneta also showcased Papirossy, a “lung-drawn” animation and audiovisual installation created by Otto Alder, acclaimed animation historian, documentarian, and co-chairman of HGKL (Hochschule fur Gestaltung und Kunst Luzern) in Luzern, Switzerland. “Lung-drawn” is a confusing phrase that refers to Otto blowing cigarette smoke onto cardboard which was combined with animation to create an effect which he describes as “an installation that visualizes time through imprinted smoke on cardboard to create an effect where time is frozen, the past stays fixed, and emotions are visualized by integrating animation into a mixed media installation.” Papirossy is the first lung-drawn animation ever filmed and the installation has traveled worldwide.
