The story of Maciek Szczerbowski and the Animator Festival comes full circle. The winner of the first edition of Animator and this year’s Oscar recipient for Best Animated Short Film will come to Poznań in July!
We are delighted to announce that Maciek Szczerbowski will be a special guest of the 19th edition of Animator. During the festival, he will meet with the audience and present short films he created together with Chris Lavis. At the awards ceremony, the Oscar-winning “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” will be presented with a unique live musical accompaniment.
Maciek Szczerbowski is the co-creator of “The Girl Who Cried Pearls,” which won this year’s Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. This award not only confirms the value of painstaking stop-motion animation, but is also a source of pride for the City of Poznań. Although Maciek Szczerbowski lives in Canada on a daily basis, he originally comes from Poznań. He is well known to local animation enthusiasts – he has taken part in the Animator International Animated Film Festival multiple times. His earlier film “Madame Tutli-Putli,” also created with Chris Lavis, won the Grand Prix – the Golden Pegasus at the festival’s first edition, and was later nominated for an Oscar. It was one of the moments that cemented Animator’s reputation as a place that discovers creators with global potential. Since then, Maciek Szczerbowski has returned to his hometown many times, sharing his knowledge and experience with new generations of artists.
This year’s edition of Animator would not be complete without him. From July 4–12, Maciek Szczerbowski will once again return to Poznań for the Animator Festival.
At which events will you be able to meet Maciek Szczerbowski?
1) He will lead a special masterclass dedicated to his creative work.
2) He will open this year’s edition of the event with a screening of his short animations.
3) During the awards ceremony at Apollo Cinema on July 11, an extraordinary screening of the Oscar-winning “The Girl Who Cried Pearls” will be presented with a unique live musical accompaniment.
Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis
Since 1997 Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis have formed the artistic partnership called Clyde Henry Productions. Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis (Clyde Henry Productions) are award-winning writers, directors and animators. Their first film, “Madame Tutli-Putli” i (NFB), was recognized with an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short (2007). Szczerbowski and Lavis went on to adapt Maurice Sendak’s “Higglety Pigglety Pop!” (NFB, Warner Brothers) and direct Meryl Streep in the film. In 2016, the duo were recognized with a nomination for Best Art Direction at the Canadian Screen Awards for their work on Guy Maddin’s feature “The Forbidden Room”. In 2017, 20 years of artistic creation was celebrated with retrospectives at the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal) and the Annecy International Animation Festival in France. Then, in 2019, they created the VR film “Gymnasia” (Felix & Paul, NFB), a unique blend of virtual reality and stop-motion animation, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and went on to win numerous awards, including a Canadian Screen Award for Best Immersive Experience. Most recently, they collaborated with Montreal’s Compulsion Games and X-Box to direct a short stop-motion introduction to the game “South of Midnight”.
You will be able to meet Maciek Szczerbowski during the 19th edition
of the Animator Festival, taking place from July 4–12 in Poznań.
