With curious eyes and an open mind, the festival offers a glimpse into the history of cinema and its present, bringing together the works of talented and courageous directors. Some of these authors have received little attention undeservedly, while others are considered canon in cinema history.

At the centre of the festival’s retrospective is Jan Švankmajer – Czech animator, director, and avant-garde artist who turns 90 this year. For 60 years, this Prague-born author has guided audiences through the cabinets of black humour and surreal metaphors into the thickets of fairy tales and absurdity, thereby creating an idiosyncratic opposing force to various political powers and conventions, having experienced six different political regimes in his lifetime.

Švankmajer has worked with various media and film-lengths, but he is most recognized for his stop-motion and clay animation work, known for being infused with surrealism, psychoanalytic theory, and European post-war modernism. Whether exploring dark dreams in the feature film Alice (1987), his recurring Faust character in his filmography, or the fragmented web of his gastronomic nightmare Food (1992), the colourful gallery of the director’s characters and his ruthless satirical humour now permeates the entirety of cinema as we know it.

In the author’s own words, suddenly, “magic enters into a quite ordinary contact with mundane things… (making) reality seem doubtful.”