The genre's recognizable styles, iconography, themes and narrative structures influenced filmmakers on each continent to make Western and Western-like movies. In the 1960s a mass production of European Westerns was launched on both sides of the Iron Curtain. However, while the majority of cineastes are familiar with Sergio Leone's Spaghetti-Westerns and East German "Indianerfilme" starring Gojko Mitić, not everyone knows that before the genre has been successfully adapted by European live action directors, it had appeared in animated films by such outstanding authors of then socialist countries as Jiří Trnka, Dušan Vokotić and Witold Giersz. The following programme traces the development of (mostly) European animated Westerns that throughout the years deconstructed, reinterpreted and parodied the genre's cliches, but at the same time expressed the deepest cinematic passion for the Wild West legend.
Curator: Machał Bobrowski
Lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities at the Marie Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin. In 2010 he obtained PhD in Film Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. In 2012 he published a book “Akira Kurosawa: The Artist of the Borderlands”. In 2016 he co-edited a monograph “Obsession. Perversion. Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation”. He is a Programme Director and a co-founder of StopTrik International Film Festival (Slovenia/Poland), an event dedicated to stop motion animation. He works with various European festivals and cinema institutions as a curator, educator and cultural activist. He wrote numerous academic and popular articles devoted to classic Japanese and American cinema as well as animation.
