A diverse accompanying programme is essential to the Fest Anča International Animation Festival. The focus of the festival’s 17th edition – Nightmare – will also be reflected in the musical performances of remarkable inter/national performers such as DJ Lycox, মm., Zaffer9 and Bolka, as well as in masterclasses, exhibitions, and lectures.
WEDNESDAY
Tucano Urbano (also known as Filip Smith) will lead the festival warm-up at Stanica Žilina-Záriečie with an intense 90 minutes of fast-paced Jersey Club rhythms, UKG, and tropical-trance trap music. A great set featuring the best beats will get you on the dancefloor.
THURSDAY
Slovak artist, DJ and dancer Krishpin will perform at the Žilina Municipal Theatre and later at the New Synagogue after the opening ceremony. His selections are based on both traditional and post-club forms of Latin American and African music: from merengue to Nigerian cruise. Across this spectrum, his sets reflect his own Central European Gen Z identity by referencing pop hits or early 2000s internet culture. The result is escalated situations that are dirty, gritty, deep, but also very funny.
FRIDAY
Friday’s accompanying programme will take place at the Žilina-Záriečie Station. Duo Zaffer 9 (Helena Hájková and Viktor Jenčuš) will present a fusion of witch house, hyper-pop, noise and glitchcore in a specific concept of club electronica. Prepare for soaring vocals, deconstructed rhythms, and melodies inspired by the angst of the post-internet age.
A nightmare fusion of film and music will be brought to life with a screening of an adult puppet fairy tale called Blood Time and Red String created by independent American director Christiane Cegavske over a period of 13 years. This mystical world’s soundtrack will be performed by the Slovak sound artist Bolka. His subversive musical production is charmingly entertaining and sonically complex – bordering on experimental pop and sound design.
Evil Medvěd, the project of Scottish-Czech artist Faolan McGowan, will also be performed live. They are interested in organic analogue creation through modular synthesis. Their production is intricate, yet playful, tender, and personal. They often hold workshops at Synth Library Prague, a feminist institution committed to providing access to music technology while presenting a platform for critical thinking
Experimental baile funk, dembow and reggaeton will be mixed by Slovak music journalist DJ VLZQUES b2b yangovica. They will be joined with a VJ set by Kristýna Sidlárová alias sida100, a Czech visual artist and graphic designer, whose works have been shown at London’s Tate Modern.
sida100Friday evening will also feature a distinctive atmosphere of disparate but melodic and breathtaking music, stripped to its very core, presented by Alina Astrova, performing under the artistic name Lolina. Before embarking on her solo career, she was part of the duo Hype Williams with Dean Blunt. She currently tackles themes such as hostility, immigration and social inequality in London, while her hazy vocals absorb the words into haunting melodies to create something uniquely beautiful.
SATURDAY
On Saturday, at Stanici Žilina-Záriečie, Fest Anča visitors can look forward to percussive sets building on the Global South rhythms to trace collaborative musical histories and hybridities across the wider region from the hyper-talented Vienna-based মm. (mwo). Their sets question how the roots of queer and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, (and) People of Color) club music are reflected, erased and appropriated across the Western club spectrum.
“It’s important for me to be constantly in conversation with the dance floor, and to be critical of how these spaces are constructed and, most importantly, who they are designed for. My tendency is to focus on queerness and recreate ideas of nightlife and dance from Euro-American club culture,” says মm.
PiNKBUS: Venice Intervention will also be presented on Saturday. An award-winning contemporary dance and physical theatre dancer, choreographer and performer Martin “Venice” Talaga is also interested in experimental and visual works, folk dance and drag. During his studies and professional career, he has successfully collaborated with many choreographers, theatre directors and companies.
Multidisciplinary artist seafur will light up the dance floor at Station Žilina-Záriečie with a blend of genres, decades and moods. seafur likes to demolish the concept of guilty pleasures, so the eclectic selection will include hyperpop and salsa, dembow and synthpop, batida and soundcloud bootlegs. seafur will be accompanied by Sewingbug – a VJ and director of short animated films based in Krakow and Seoul – as part of the VJ set. Sewingbug uses bizarre 3D and 2D animations in his work and has performed at several major events such as Berlin Artweeks, Seoul NADA FEST and VJ battle in Gdansk.
Parisian producer DJ Lycox will oversee the festival’s exciting and energetic finale. The range of his musical productions is wide – introspective afrohouse sits alongside cinematic jungle excursions, and slower BPMs are followed by more melodic tracks with traditional “latas” batida percussions.
THERE’S MORE
In addition to the musical programme, Fest Anča also prepared an accompanying programme. Nikita Diakur, the main guest of the festival and a leading name in contemporary animation, will present his distinctive work using glitch aesthetics at a masterclass. The masterclass will be followed by a screening of his films. Cinematographer Denisa Buranová and her camera team will talk about their work on the award-winning children’s puppet film Tony, Shelly and the Magic Light, and for animators and cinematographers they have also prepared a practical workshop Behind the scenes of stop-motion animation. Their film will be screened as part of the Fest Anča programme. Katarína Nádaská, a leading Slovak ethnologist and historian, will give a lecture about nightmares in a historical context. She will focus mainly on the experiences of queer people in the Slovak countryside.
The exhibition Nevedomie by the Slovak animator Martina Malovaníková, who also works in painting and illustration, will be full of suggestions about drastic contemporary impulses, preserved in distant places of the mind. In the exhibition Unless Useless, the artist Toasted_Bread will bring the content of emotional reflections into a raw environment. He works as a volunteer for the European Solidarity Corps in the cultural centres New Synagogue and Stanica Žilina-Záriečie.
At Stanici Žilina-Záriečie you will be able to see posters by Slovak visual artist and animator Matej Mihályi, which he created for the BAB Festival. After a long break, the legendary Animation Karaoke Battle format will also return to Fest Anča. This challenge aims to showcase any creative activity during a randomly selected film.
The Fest Anča International Animation Festival 2024 is financially supported by the Audiovisual Fund, LITA Fund, SPP Foundation and FPU Art Support Fund.
