The 35th World Animated Film Festival – Animafest Zagreb 2025, the most important Croatian film festival and one of the three leading animation festivals in the world, will begin with a grand opening at the SC Cinema tonight at 8 pm. This year, Animafest will attract 350 foreign guests to Zagreb, screen the same number of films, and attract thousands of viewers and visitors to cinemas, exhibition spaces, and other venues. Representatives of the City of Zagreb, the Ministry of Culture and Media of the Republic of Croatia, the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, embassies of several countries, the International Animated Film Association ASIFA, and other distinguished guests have announced their arrival at the grand opening of Animafest 2025, along with festival guests. Gudrun Krebitz will accept the award for the Best Animation School on behalf of the Konrad Wolf Film University Babelsberg, while the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Michaela Pavlátová, who is arriving in Zagreb later this week, will address the audience via video message and will receive her award at the closing ceremony on 7 June. The Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies will also be presented to Greek-French professor Georges Sifianos.

Last weekend, open-air screenings took place in Zrinjevac and Maksimir, and one such screening will be held today at KNAP from 8 pm, with a selection of films for ages 4+ entitled Baker Boris and Friends. Although only one official exhibition opening is scheduled for Monday – that of the Konrad Wolf Film University Babelsberg, which brings together animations, drawings and sketches by Jelena Milunović, Ariel Victor Arthant and Pearl Seemann at the Šira Gallery (Mon-Fri 9am-4pm and 6pm-8pm, Sat 11am-4pm), who will give their own authorial commentary on it at 1pm – all Animafest exhibitions can already be visited from this morning at the Kranjčar Gallery (Michaela Pavlátová: Are You Listening to Me? is a unique insight into the creative world of this animation master with a special emphasis on the video installation from the title, every day from 11am to 7pm), the Kaptol Gallery (Stipan Tadić: Naïve Art and Nightmares: Fačuk – Between Croatian Naive Tradition and Contemporary Fine Art Expression features insight into the process of visual design of Maida Srabović’s film based on the paintings of Mijo Kovačić, Mon-Fri 10am-5pm, Sat-Sun 10am-2pm), the Gallery on the 1st floor of KIC (Behind the Scenes 7, group exhibition of 27 authors selected in the Great Short Film Competition, Mon-Sat 11am-10pm), Klet Studio-gallery (Behind the Scenes 7, group exhibition of 19 authors selected in the Student Film Competition, Mon-Sat 10am-8pm) and Mijo Kovačić Gallery (Mijo Kovačić in Dialogue with Stipan Tadić, in addition to a permanent display of representative works by one of the most prominent painters of the second generation of Podravina painters, visitors are offered communication with selected works by Stipan Tadić, made for the needs of the film Fačuk, Mon-Fri 10am-2pm). Admission to all Animafest exhibitions is free.

Today’s film programme as part of the opening ceremony also includes the Grand Competition Short Film 1. Screenings include: Jelena Oroz’s autobiographical film No Room about frustration with the low level of traffic culture and strategy, in which the established author uses stop-motion animation for the first time in addition to 2D; Seun Yee’s Boundaries, a collage and classically animated reflection on spatiality, ‘neighbourliness’, claustrophobia and the threatened privacy of contemporary life; Rand Beiruty’s touching and engaging Shadows about a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, mother and wife, a product of little-known Jordanian animated film cinema, also screened at the Venice Film Festival; Christoph Horch’s radical exploration of intolerance and aversion to partner flaws The Way You Look Tonight; Alexey Evstigneev’s award-winning stop-motion animation Father’s Letters about the real-life case of a meteorologist who wrote to his daughter from the gulag in the 1930s; Meejin Hong’s Deluge, which depicts a saturated space of memory in constant flux, also screened at the Rotterdam festival; an ecological gag-dystopia about the carbon footprint Quota by famous Dutch animated film comedy writers Job, Joris & Marieke. Kata Gugić will talk to the authors of the films after the screening. Second screening of the Grand Competition Short Film 1 is scheduled for Thursday, 5th June at 6pm at the Kinoteka Cinema.