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| Vranje 2000 Report | Bordo Dovnikovic (Croatia) |
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VRANJE 2000 2nd INTERNATIONAL CHILDREN ANIMATION WORKSHOP |
 A very valuable international animation workshop was held in a little town Vranje in Yugoslavia, (bombed by NATO several months ago), directly on the eve of the famous elections that dethroned Milosevic. Since a few years ago I had invitations from the people of SAF (The School of Animated Film) in Vranje to visit their young animators, but I never found a free term for that. In 1999, just on the eve the bombing, Robi Engler, director and animator from Lausanne, Switzerland, who had accepted to be a foreign guest on the Vranje Workshop, wrote to me: "Bordo, let's go together to Vranje to make clear that artists and animators don't believe in violence, that we distinguish between government and people". Of course, that year we didn't go to Vranje - you know what happened there immediatelly after that. But in the next year, finally, we met each other at the Belgrade airport and were lifted (with the car of the Vranje City Hall) from the north to the south of Serbia, close to Macedonia and Kosovo. |
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Mr. Miroslav Miki Simonovic, the legendary head of the children animation workshop in Vranje, welcomed us in the Town Culture Center, where the SAF has several rooms (the office, workshop and technic equipment). We were introduced there to third guest, our Bulgarian colleague, director and animator, Pencho Kunchev, who arrived from Sofia. Then we were saluted by the several groups of children, amateur-animators, from Vranje, other towns from Serbia, and from Timisoara in Rumania.
Children were devided into three groups: the first one for sand-animation with Robi Engler, the second one for clay-animation with Pencho Kunchev, and the third one for classic cartoon with me. The children worked for six days on different subjects, and on the last days they edited music for three films. At the end, the highlight was the festive screening for the participants, guests, parents from Vranje and the town representatives. Can you image the atmosphere between children-animators during that afternoon before the opening night?! Unfortunately Robi had to return home earlier (bussines obligations) and didn't go to the exceptional excursion to the very old monastery Prokhor Pchinsky, just close to the Macedonian border, where the organizers prepared a picnic on the river, at the meadow with a flock of sheeps.. We were lucky to have a beautiful, sunny weather. The children guests were accomodated with the domestic families in the town, and the feeding was organized in the factory restaurant of the main festival sponsor - Holding Company "Simpo". The SAF Vranje is existing for twelve years already. Thanking to support of their town, they have a good computer equipment for animation shooting and they became the organizer of a regular international workshop. Naturally, we hope the International Workshop will widen invitations to more countries in the future. I'd like to point out to the importance of the children animation workshops conducted by experienced filmmakers. These happenings are the right promotion of animation between young generation. We know that the animation workshop participants generally don't become professional filmmakers, but they get up how to make animated film and then how to watch it - not only as entertainment, than as an act of creativity. It's necessary to spread the movement of the children animation workshops, especially international ones, and ASIFA already gives a big contribution to it. |
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