Animest.20 to Host the Brothers Quay in Bucharest: Stop-Motion Like You’ve Never Experienced Before

Animest.20 is pulling out all the stops for the festival’s anniversary edition: Stephen and Timothy Quay, known as the Quay Brothers – reinventors of stop-motion animation and authors of dark hypnotizing films that made them two of the most influential animation visionaries in the history of the field – are the special guests of the 20th edition of the Animest International Animation Film Festival (October 3-12).

Originally from the USA, the identical twins relocated to the UK over 50 years ago. Animation fans will know them for their “perfectly imperfect” cinematic universe – fragile puppets, found objects, hidden spaces; a hypnotizing intersection of the bizarre, poetic and macabre. Visually inspired by Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz and Jan Svankmajer, the Quays’ trademark dreamlike, eerie style has in turn inspired many others.  Teaser video:

Starting with their student films in 1971, the Quay Brothers created over 45 video projects: three feature films, music videos (including for Peter Gabriel’s His Name Is Alive), documentaries, and iconic personal projects. The latter include set design and production for opera, theater plays, and concerts, including for Tchaikovsky's Mazeppa (1991), Eugen Ionesco’s The Chairs (attracting a Best Scenic Design nomination for the 1997 Tony Awards), Richard Ayre’s The Cricket Recovers (2005), and works by Bartók and Kafka.

The Quay Brothers’ influence stretches well beyond animation – take superfan Christopher Nolan, who assembled a dedicated retrospective, The Quay Brothers in 35mm, and directed a black and white seven-minute documentary called Quay. Narrated by Nolan himself, the doc explores the Quays’ studio and creative process, in a personal homage to their unique style. Recently, the Quay Brothers’ irrefutable cultural impact was reconfirmed through an ample retrospective at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Among the multiple national premieres at the Animest.20 anniversary edition, we are happy to include the Quay Brothers’ latest feature film, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, a stop-motion/live-action hybrid first screened during last year’s Venice International Film Festival’s Giornate degli Autori section. An adaptation of Polish writer Bruno Schulz’s surrealist writing, who also inspired their famous short film Street of Crocodiles (1986), the feature follows Jozef’s ghostly train journey as he travels to his dying father living in a sanatorium on the edge of a mythic Galician forest. Once there, he discovers a realm of distorted time and stories where his father is suspended between life and death. As Josef “confronts various manifestations of his father, each representing different aspects of their relationship and his own psyche” (The Film Stage), we go on an ample, “increasingly fragmented and dreamlike” visual exploration of memory, the subconscious, and the fragility of life.

Coming some two decades after their feature The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, this latest offering is a “dark, densely nested fairytale of life, death and what comes in between” (Variety), adding to the catalogue of “distinctively ethereal visuals” imagined by the Quay Brothers.

Unsure of where to start with the Brothers Quay, or ready for an always-welcome rewatch? Animest.20 also includes a selection of their most well-known short films, spanning their half-century career. Take, for instance, their masterpiece Street of Crocodiles (1986), included by director Terry Gilliam in his top 10 animations of all time. A caretaker closes up a lecture hall and sets a gaunt puppet free. As we explore the nightmarish rooms alongside it, we sample what the directors describe as "mechanical realities and manufactured pleasures." A more recent short is Maska (2010), adapting a short story by Stanisław Lem. With a soundtrack by Krzysztof Penderecki, this film stands apart among the Brothers Quay’s body of work. A complex meditation on identity, technology, and transformation, the film’s surreal, yet well-defined world – both technologically developed and feudal – is the backdrop for beautiful Duenna’s choice between accomplishing the task she was created for and love. 

In Absentia (2000) marks the Quay Brothers’ collaboration with avant-garde German wunder-composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, the “father of electronic music,” as part of the BBC-sponsored series Sound on Film International, exploring the relationship between sound and image. Capturing the mindscape of a woman alone in a room repeatedly writing a letter with broken-off pieces of pencil lead, while outside the ever-changing light follows her every emotion, this abstract animation combines live-action with the Quays’ trademark visuals, resulting in a profound meditation on isolation, obsession, and mental health. The soundtrack completes the haunting visuals.

The Quay Brothers retrospective at Animest.20 also includes Alice in Not So Wonderland (2007) and episodes I (Dramolet, 1988) and III (Tales From the Vienna Woods, 1993) in the Stille Nacht series.

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The Animest Festival is a project of the Animest Association, co-financed by AFCN–the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

This project does not officially represent the AFCN’s stance, nor may AFCN be held responsible for the festival’s content or outcomes – these are fully under the beneficiary’s responsibility.

Presented by: ING Bank

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