It is day three of the World Festival of Animated Film, and neither younger nor older viewers, nor authors nor animation theorists, are stopping in demonstrating their passion for the most beautiful film genre. Visitors from 7 to 10 years of age from 9:30 am, and then again from 11:30 am, can enjoy the Films for Children Competition 2 at Kinoteka with a conversation with Fiona Rolland (Bobel’s Kitchen) and films such as House Trap, The Night Boots, The Carp and the Child, Lulina and the Moon. The same programme is also being shown at NS Sesvete today at 10 am.

At 2 pm, Kinoteka screens Kristina Dufkova’s Living Large from the Grand Competition Short Film. This is an inclusive screening accompanied by audio description, AD subtitles and live Croatian sign language (produced in collaboration with the Filmaktiv Association), and this teenage puppet and 2D singing comedy follows an overweight and witty twelve-year-old, an excellent cook and musician on his journey to lose weight and win over a schoolmate. The adaptation of Mikaël Ollivier’s youth novel celebrates the support of friends and family, self-acceptance and self-irony and was created over the course of 13 years. Producer Agata Novinski will talk about this long-term process after the screening. Wednesday at Kinoteka continues at 4 pm with the first segment of the review of South Korea, ‘Concrete Dreams’, which presents the history of independent animation through the works of authors such as Yumi Joung (Dust Kid), Jee-youn Park (The Things She Can’t Avoid in the City), Woon Han (The Mouse Trap), Sae-byul Hwangbo (Rubout) and others, who offer different perspectives on contemporary urban life of the lower middle class. After the screening, Nika Petković talks with Hyung-yun Chang, the author of the film Tea Time.

Next up is Grand Competition Short Film 6 at 6 pm with: Sarah Beeby’s Gardening, a spectacularly designed surrealist look at the trauma of sexual assault, Natalia León’s As if the Earth Had Swallowed Them Up, another engaging work, this time about femicide in Mexico that is addressed through a girl’s reminiscences of her childhood, Dolores by Cecilia Andalón Delgadillo, a slightly macabre paraphrase of Alice in Wonderland, A Pain in the Butt by Elena Walf, a German-Croatian co-production of animal gag-humour from the Lenas Hof series, Raphaël Jouzeau’s tender and melancholic Scars We Love, a creative visualisation of a breakup conversation and a moving study of emotional inhibitions and inconsistencies, Freeride in C by Edmunds Jansons, a ski film and an ‘abstract dance of pleasure and fragility’, and Marten Visser’s Skroll, a look at the complacency of a new media, reference-choked society of spectacle in which various documentary practices are merged with monstrosity.

At 8 pm, Kinoteka, followed by a Q&A with the author after the screening, will screen the feature film Balentes by Giovanni Columbu, a Sardinian story about two boys who freed horses from a military farm in 1940 in an act of daring but reckless longing for adventure. Genre-wise, between historical melancholic-fatalistic (melo)drama, western, folk ballad and homage, Balentes tells his story fragmentarily, but also polyphonically, while his mostly monochromatic visual expression is at the crossroads of avant-garde, attraction film, rotoscoping, silhouette and experimentalism, with almost 30,000 landscapes created with gestural brushstrokes, scratches, stains, loops and glitches.

Animafest Scanner XII continues and concludes at KIC from 9:30 am with panels on the possibility of the line and violence in animated films, i.e. presentations by Corrie Francis Parks (USA), Alina Helmcke (Germany), Paola Bristot (Italy), Adriana Navarro-Álvarez (Spain), Esther Bley (USA), Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre (Canada), Mina Sablić Papajić (Serbia) and Caroline López Caballero (Spain). Today’s discussions are moderated by Andrijana Ružić and Holger Lang, and as on the previous day, from 5 pm, new books will be presented at the same place: Woman and Film Animation: A Feminist Corpus at the National Film Board of Canada 1939-1989 by Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre, On the Animation Trail: 20 Years of Animation Festival History by Nancy Denney-Phelps and Storyboards of Croatian Animation Films Manivald and Morana by editor Matija Pisačić. Along with the authors, Boško Picula and Paola Orlić take part in the promotion.

The exhibition ‘Stipan Tadić: Fačuk’ at the Kaptol Gallery is scheduled for a ceremonial opening today at 1 pm. At the Museum of Contemporary Art, the film programme on Wednesday is quantitatively somewhat more concise, but qualitatively superb. The second segment of the South Korean focus, ‘Bound by Blood’ (5:30 pm), brings together works that depict conflict and reconciliation in the family – traditionally the most important Korean community that can be a protective fence, but also a cage. Some of the directors include Jinkyu Jeon (The House of Loss), Nari Jang (My Father’s Room), Jin Woo (San) and Kang-min Kim (Kkum). Shunsaku Hayashi’s impressive Invisions (Monument) from the Grand Competition Feature Film can also be seen today at the MSU at 7 pm.

Wednesday at MM Centre exactly at noon features the Animafest PRO panel ‘When Student Films Become Professional’ with the participation of Martin Vandas, Tina Smrekar, Jelena Milunović and Daniel Šuljić. The third AFN Edu and Varya Yakovleva’s workshop continue. Next comes the fourth segment of the theme film programme ‘The World Is on the Edge’ dedicated to protests and activism (4 pm). Among the 16 films, there are those by Daniel Bird, Paula Bush and Simone Giampaolo, as well as those by artistic collectives such as Ligebita Libera, Animators Against War, Agedo Kolpla Talde and #StandWithUkraine. Reynaert Vosveld, the author of the movie Baton, is a guest. Then, from 6 pm, we watch World Panorama 2, with guest appearances by Natasza Cetner (Inside, the Valley Sings) and Krste Gospodinovski (Silent Cinema). At 8 pm, the third segment of ‘The World Is on the Edge’ deals with the terror of state apparatuses.

At SC Cinema, the day begins with a rerun of World Panorama 1 (1 pm), and then continues with the traditional section Time for the Masters (3:30 pm), which brings together new films by established authors whose rich careers we could regularly follow through Animafest. After the screening, we will talk with Izibene Oñederra (When It Comes (It Will Have Your Eyes)) and Thomas Renoldner (Stampfer Dreams), and we will also see works by Yumi Joung, Priit and Olga Pärn, Lei Lei, Vera Neubauer and Raa Heidmets. At 5:30 pm, the Student Competition returns to SC, and after number two we have Eleni Aerts (Red Meat), Marta Margetić (Spine), Qi Duan (Sh), Justin Fayard (HIC SVNT DRACONES), Pearl Seemann (Opto Optics), Nolan Downs (Take Me Drunk I’m Home), NanTung Lin (The Peel), Ziyu Wang and Jinhong Yu (Bon Appetite). At 8 pm, the Grand Competition Short Film 3 also hosts the authors: Vuk Jevremović (Moral Support), Samuel Patthey (Voiceless), Matúš Vizár (Free the Chickens), Daniella Pires Schuarts and Leonardo Carneiro Salomão (Yuca Collective, Impossible Journey), Sasha Svirsky (Dull Spots of Greenish Colours), Zinia Scorier and Marie Royer (Mealitancy).

Wednesday wraps up with a selection of classics from the 65-year history of the International Animated Film Association ASIFA (10 pm, SC Cinema) – a truly must-see selection of legends such as Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart (Begone Dull Care), Raoul Servais (To Speak or Not to Speak), Caroline Leaf (The Street), Renzo Kinoshita (Pica-Don), Borivoj Dovniković (Learning to Walk), Jerzy Kucia (Tuning the Instruments), Paul Driessen (The Killing of an Egg) and Joanna Quinn (Girls’ Night Out). Deanna Morse and Thomas Renoldner, President and Secretary General of ASIFA, will introduce us to the screening.