Opening Night Of Annecy Festival Turns Political As Filmmakers Go Off-Script

While the Annecy Festival’s rebellious spirit has given way in recent times to a carefully stage-managed event that placates corporate sponsors, there are still some pockets of rebelliousness to be found among the attending filmmakers.

That indie bravado was on display at Sunday night’s opening ceremony when two esteemed filmmakers went off-script and addressed world events, each doing it in their own way.

Firstly, Bulgarian/Canadian filmmaker Theodore Ushev, who won the short film grand prize at Annecy in 2020 for The Physics of Sorrow and was nominated for an Oscar in 2017 for Blind Vaysha, world premiered his new film Life with an Idiot, adapted from the short stories of dissident Russian writer Victor Erofeyev.

Invited onstage to talk about the film, at one point Ushev told the audience, “Fuck Putin, fuck Trump, and fuck Netanyahu, fuck the fascists” with the packed house of 925 people from every corner of the animation world “erupting into applause,” according to a report in Deadline. (It should be noted that the images of all three people who Ushev mentioned are also depicted in his latest short, a still from which can be seen at the top of this post).

In discussing his latest film, Ushev also added, “If you follow an imbecile, the chance you’ll become an imbecile is very high; if you admire an idiot, your risk of becoming an idiot is very high.” A complete video Ushev’s speech can be seen below:

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A post shared by Theodore Ushev (@ushev)

Meanwhile, two-time-Oscar-nominated British filmmaker Joanna Quinn, who received an honorary Cristal at the opening ceremony, dedicated her prize to Gazan animator Haneen Koraz, who has been running animation workshops for displaced children in Gaza.

Quinn said about Koraz on stage (as quoted by Deadline):

One day, she’ll be stood here, holding one of these [pointing to her Cristal award], hint, hint. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the kids could come here and watch their films.

Quinn, whose most recent film Affairs of the Art was nominated for an Oscar in 2022, has been involved with helping children in Gaza throughout the last year and has launched a program called “To Gaza, With Love: A Global Anijam,” which both raises money for Koraz’s animation work and encourages animators around the world to create short messages of love and support for the Palestinian people. A curated collection of the films created for the anijam will begin touring animation festivals this fall.