The National Cinema Museum is collaborating with the 24th edition of ENCHANTMENTS, by presenting a tribute to the great Czech artist Jiri Trnka.

The successful partnership between the National Cinema Museum and Enchantments - International Figurine Theatre Festival, reaching its 24th edition this year, is taking place once again.

This year’s tribute is dedicated to the great Czech artist Jiri Trnka, a puppeteer, an illustrator and a filmmaker. A famous illustrator of children’s books, he is also known as the author and director of animation films that use stop-motion technique, an activity he began in 1946. In 1968 he received the Hans Christian Andersen award for his international career and his contributions to childhood literature.

During this evening, his stop-motion masterpiece Sen noci svatojanske will be screened, in which Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream is narrated by Richard Burton’s off-screen voice. Not a film with marionettes or puppets, but a rich world with animated sculptures, built with experimental flexible plastic, which moves within very detailed settings inspired by the Czech Baroque, with elaborate photography and suggestive photo-editing. His adaptation from Shakespeare is carried out with a certain freedom, so much so, that one of the main characters, Bottom, has become a Czech peasant.

The programme will be introduced and commented by Eugenia Gaglianone and Andrea Pagliardi. The tribute is organised in collaboration with ASIFA Italia. Admission 6.00/4.00 euro.

Sen noci svatojanske (A midsummer night’s dream)

(Czech Republic 1959, 76’, DCP, col., o.v. it. s/t)

A group of people chases each other inside an enchanted forest populated by elves and fairies, in the neighbourhood of Athens. There are Hermia and Lysander – madly in love with each other - and Demetrius and Helena, achingly in love with the other two. Queen Titania and king Oberon follow the lovers’ adventures without being seen, until the king decides to intervene to help Helena. He thus assigns a task to the imp Puck: he will have to pour a magic potion on the sleeping lovers’ eyelids which will make each one of them fall in love with the first person they see upon awakening. However, clumsy Puck makes one of his messes out of it, and not all will go in the right direction...