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On 18 July, the first tickets to this year\u2019s Riga International Film Festival (RIGA IFF, 17\u201327 October) go on sale, granting access to the retrospective of Czech animation director and artist Jan \u0160vankmajer, in the festival section\u00a0<\/b>IN KINO VERITAS<\/b><\/a>. The festival will celebrate the 90th anniversary of the author along with the centenary of the Surrealist movement and examine its role during the Cold War. \u0160vankmajer retrospective screenings will take place over two weekends,19\u201320 and 26\u201327 October,at the festival\u2019s main venue, cinema Splendid Palace. A documentary film on the director\u2019s life and work will be screened online throughout Latvia.<\/b><\/p>\n For 60 years, the Prague born author has led the viewers into boudoirs of dark humour and surreal metaphors and thickets of fairytale stories and absurd, creating a unique opposition to various powers (having lived through six political regimes) and conventions. \u0160vankmajer has worked in countless media and lengths of film, gaining recognition with his sumptuous static frames and mixed-technique and clay animation imbued with a breath of Surrealism, psychoanalysis, and European post-war modernism. RIGA IFF will present his most acclaimed and also underrated feature and short films, previously not screened in Latvia \u2013 among them his early experiments from the 1960s, a gothic version of Alice in Wonderland, meditations on fetishes, food, politics, and the role of art in public and personal life.<\/p>\n \u201cSimilar to Luis Bu\u00f1uel\u2019s razor in An Andalusian Dog (1929), \u0160vankmajer provocatively split the confines of reality. His films, created in \u00a0the political and historic soil of Eastern Europe and Czech Republic, offered up dreamscapes, nightmares, fairytales, and skits, and created an uneasy, hard to define opposition to the political regime. Currently, surrounded by the anonymous stream of online images, only the odd one among us knows that the scenes of objects, clay or mixed-technique animation are created by \u0160vankmajer. This is why the festival invites the viewers to discover the largest continent of film history \u2013 the unconscious \u2013 and make the experience personal,\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n tells IN KINO VERITAS curator D\u0101rta Ceri\u0146a.<\/p>\n\n