September 29, 2021 - The Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Festival online event presents Croatia with thirteen female animation authors who talk about gender inequality and other issues of the modern world.

Online event hosting obviously gained momentum during the coronavirus pandemic, as going out became risky for public health. The advent of the vaccine has seen Croatia slowly but steadily returning back to public event hosting, but there are some exceptions. Maybe it's the extra precauiton due to Croatian vaccine scepticism, or maybe just the possibility of less expensive organisation and more potential for attending regardless of your location on the map, but some events have remained online.

One such event is the Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Festival, a Vienna Film festival described by Culturenet as the only animated film festival focused on female authors. Organised by the Vox Feminae feminist news portal and the Austrian Culture Forum (AKF), the festival is being streamed on the websites of the organisers until October 10, making this an official (but only online) visit of the festival to Croatia. 13 short animated movies are selected for the online screening.

''From gender equality to digitalisation, from human and workers rights do social, economic and ecological issues, the Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Festival questions social and political reality from the feminist art perspective, pointing out social inequality in a new and innovative way,'' describes the Culturenet website.

The festival usually occurs on March 8 to commemorate International Women's Day. TCN is also no stranger to writing about noted women from Croatia's history or about current issues with gender equality, on March 8 and of course on many other days too.

The authors whose short animated work the festival presents are: Maya Yonesho, Susi Jirkuff, Ani Antonova, Rebecca Akoun, Veronika Schubert, Sabine Groschup, Beate Hecher i Markus Keim, Billy Roisz, Kathrin Steinbacher and Anna Vasof.

The films showcased are subtitled in English, making the event approachable to non-Croatian speakers too. As the 2021 edition is in progress, the plans for the 2022 edition are already ongoing. Interested female authors can apply for their work to be shown by October 4 this year, and the 2022 festival screening is scheduled from March 9-13 in 2022.

''We're proud to be able to announce a new award: The Maria Lassnig Golden Film Reel for outstanding animation will be awarded for the very first time in 2022. Sponsored by the Maria Lassnig Foundation, it is worth 10,000 euros and will be awarded annually. An international expert jury will select the winner from the films shown in the International Competition of our festival,'' announced the festival's official website.

The award, named after Maria Lasnig (1919-2014), who was a pioneer of experimental animation and one of the first women in the German-speaking world to be appointed to a professorship in art, shows this valuable festival is here to stay.

Learn more about Filming in Croatia in our TC guide.

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