Estonian director Chintis Lundgren will meet the audience. After the meeting a selection of her animated shorts will be screened.
The focus this year will move to Estonia, a country that since the end of WWII has become fertile ground for animated films and a hotbed of new authors who have been setting trends and standards across Europe. The protagonist is Chintis Lundgren, born in Tallinn in 1981 and now residing in Pula, Croatia, where, in 2014, with producer Draško Ivezić she founded the Adriatic Animation Studio.
After a career as a painter, in 2008 Chintis Lundgren set the canvas and oil paints aside to focus on animation, also founding her own studio, the Chintis Lundgreni Animatsioonistuudio. It didn’t take her long to garner international recognition with her films populated by anthropomorphic animals, drawn on paper: birds, cats, foxes, little mice who drink Absinthe, smoke, play music and sing in an irreverent and humorous parody of human stupidity and weaknesses.
Her latest short film, Life With Herman h. Rott, 2015, – the story of a punk rat who marries a bourgeois cat – was presented in over 60 festivals, from Annecy to Calgary, collecting multiple awards. To date, Chintis Lundgren has made more than forty short films – many of them with birds as protagonists – spanning from commercials to on-commission work, including the very popular “Why Do Cats Act So Weird?” (2016), produced for the educational platform Ted-Ed, which got more than 2 million views on YouTube.
A fox, Manivald, is at the centre of two of her upcoming projects: Manivald and the Absinthe Rabbits, a web/tv series in development, with a gay fox, some drunk rabbits and a cross-dressing hedgehog as protagonists; and the short film Manivald, currently in production with the support of the National Film Board of Canada, which tells the story of a bizarre love triangle that soon gets out of the protagonists’ hands.
Chintis Lundgren will attend Bergamo Film Meeting from March 13 to 17
Free admission
