Official opening of the festival

On October 8th in Maribor we start with the 10th StopTrik International Film Festival, an annual celebration of animated films in the technique of stop animation.

StopTrik builds upon the idea that the festival come-together means in-depth discussion, exchange of standpoints on art´s function and aesthetics, as well as more general debate on the phenomena and directions of contemporary social and political surroundings. If you open your eyes, you will see how devastated public discourse has become, and how marginalized critical reception of arts and media appear now. And so we have no more words to speak up for and with the women marching in Belarus, LGBT activists being arrested and harassed in Poland, refugees running away from fire in the camp on Lesbos and on the borders between Bosnia and Croatia…

In this year´s programming, we´ve been inspired by Theodore Ushev´s quite simple intellectual and artistic experiment. In A-Z (ANIMATION AS A WEAPON) manifesto, Ushev named the most lethal social threats, and boldly (or maybe naively) claimed that animation art may overpower them.

With the introductory speech we will present the main topic of this year’s festival and the programme. Two screenings will follow, the first (A buck’s worth) and the last (God on our side) in a series of this year’s retrospective program (a-l & m-z), each illustrating anti-value identified by Ushev in the Manifesto.

After the official opening of the festival, you can see the exhibition "10 years of Stoptrik Festival", and in the courtyard of Vetrinj mansion we continue with celebration at a appropriate distance. This year’s opening night festivities will be steered by the audio-visual formation of two promising artists of the urban alternative scene. Appropriate for the occasion there will be also a surprise ;)