Otto Alder – International Jury member of this edition – has mad a documentary about Fedor Khitruk – the great Russian animator and the guest of the 1st of TIAF. This film will be shown as an special screening program of Tehran Animation Festival.
The Spirit of Genius
Fedor Khitruk and His Films
Anyone who associates the term animated film merely children's entertainment knows little about the artistic diversity of this genre. Since the beginning of film history, animated films have gradually evolved as an independent art from, undergoing their own, largely unknown development.
The Spirit of Genius introduces us to part of this terra incognita in film history. Presenting us with what is both a sensitive and fascinating portrait of one of the last great figures in the international animated film scene: Russian film-marker-Fedor Khitruk.
Born 1st May 1917, Fedor Khitruk is not only a witness of this century and Russian history, he is first and foremost the founding father of Post-Stalinist animated films in the Soviet Union, a genre which he has helped achieve world-wide recognition since the beginning of the Sixties.
Generations of children have him to thank for their first and most impressive visual experiences, and generations of students are still inspired by his films.
Winner of several state prizes and numerous festival awards (Cannes, Leipzig, New York, Venice Oberhausen etc), Khitruk is greatly admired in Russia today. The Film traces the reasons for this veneration. This is obviously a man who succeeded in practicing "a humane form of socialism" in an authoritarian state, making this a key theme in his films- in spite of various privileges and his status as a functionary. With his sensitive understanding of the pleasures and worries big and small-of people living under state socialism, Khitruk legitimized the animated film politically and socially as an art form, an art form that offered greater political scope than other artistic fields. Some of the big names in this trade, such as Yui Norstein, have him to thank for the fact that they were able to work undisturbed for so many years.
The Spirit of Genius traces not only Khitruk's life and his enthusiasm for the German culture but also focuses on his understanding of art and culture as basis for his "cosmopolitanism" which inevitably led him to the animated film. It is interesting to note that throughout his life, Khitruk's animated fantasy world revolved around a fixed star by the name of Disney, even though he rejected the moralizing tone in favor of enlightenment. But this is not the contradiction it might at first seem, as we see if we compare Khitruk with another icon of Russian film art: Sergei Eisenstein. A part from interviews with numerous students and colleagues of Khitruk's, the film introduces us to four of Khitruk's main works: History of a Crime', Man in Frame', Winnie-The-Pooh' and 'Film, Film, Film'.