Cannes Annecy Animation Showcase Touts Ukrainian Industry Resilience

variety.com:

Ben Croll Ukrainian producers Anna Eliseeva, Egor Olesov, and Iryna Kostyuk – who had just left the car after driving the two-day drive between Kyiv and Cannes — kicked off this year’s Annecy Goes to Cannes Animation Day with a call to arms.“While Ukraine is fighting with Russia we need to keep fighting on a cultural level,” said Olesov, whose project “Mavka, The Forest Song” (pictured) was one of five works-in-progress presented at a May 22 morning session. “Culture is our strongest weapon right now, and we need to show ours to the whole world.

That’s why our team is twice as motivated.”A family friendly 3D adventure lifted from Ukrainian folklore, the long-in-the-works project was selected at Bordeaux’s Cartoon Movie in both 2017 and 2018 and been in production since well before that.

Now with deals signed and delivery still slated for September, the filmmaking team faces pressures uncommon in even the most breakneck of timelines. “A lot of our animators are working out of bomb shelters,” Kostyuk explained. “They’ve been displaced and spread out all over.

Some of them are in occupied territories, facing Russian soldiers and tanks as they work to finish the movie.”While the project has already secured distribution across a number of international territories, the film’s domestic future remains uncertain. “We don’t know when the domestic release will happen,” said Eliseeva. “We say it will happen after our victory – and that will be very sweet.”Of course, “Mavka, The Forest Song” was something of an outlier at Annecy Goes to Cannes, a works-in-progress pitch jointly organized by Cannes Marché du Film and the Annecy Intl.