Hi friends,
The second day of competition here at Balkanima continued pretty much as the first- Most of the films filled the average category, in my opinion, allowing for a few surprises. These would be the great first time film and effort from the German young animator Moritz Mayerhofer, who’s final work at the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg , short film “URS” shows great promise and is a film which i tough stuck out in the last nights competition-You can read more on the film on the blog, a few posts down.
Besides this, i was captivated with the animation and visual style of “wings and oars”, by Vladimir Leschiov, but felt in the end the story let down the otherwise great effort by the Latvian author.
This year, the festival itself is housed at the Student city in New Belgrade- As i understand, this has been its home for all the years, execpt the first two.
With the usual Serbian sense of humor the festival director extended his hat, asking for donation to fill up the poor pockets not of the festival, but of the government, elaborating that they obviously need help:)
I feel the venue was a good choice as far as the number of people attending the festival, with the theater filed up rather good, but unfortunately the projections suffered- The entire program was played from DVD and the sound could have been better- Lets hope this will be rectified in the following days, or at least for the next years instalment!