Career Honor to Michael Dudok de Wit
During the evening of August 24, the artistic director Luigi Iovane will have the pleasure of presenting the Career Honor to Michael Dudok de Wit.
For the occasion, his entire filmography will be presented, including the short film Father and Daughter which earned him the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 2000.
Michael Dudok de Wit is a Dutch animator, director and illustrator; he makes animated films, commercials and writes and illustrates children’s books.
He lives in London but for his study and work experiences he has traveled half of Europe: Geneva, West Surrey, Barcelona. Artist of undisputed talent Dudok de Wit, although little known in our country is very famous throughout the rest of the world. In 1994 here is his first successful work, The Monk and the Fish (Le Moine et le Poisson), nominated for an Oscar and Cesar for best animated short film. In 2000 Father and Daughter (Père et Fille) won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, a BAFTA, the Grand Prix at Annecy, the Grand Prix at Animafest Zagreb and dozens of other major awards. The distinctive trait of Dudok de Wit is the use of brush, ink and watercolor expressed with the lightness and essentiality of Chinese and Japanese painting; even The Aroma of Tea, another short film by him, has the peculiarity of being drawn entirely with tea and, in the era of digitization of the stroke, still drawing the tables with a brush is really unexpected and somewhat surprising. Film without words i of him, it is music with some background noise to comment on soft, ironic, skillfully hinted emotions. In this regard, in the short film Father and Daughter, the poetic dimension is made up of silences. This means that life is told by the simplicity of the gestures and by the substance of the story which, in this way, penetrates the soul of the spectator to the point of emotion. One of the themes present in all of his films is timelessness, the “out of time”. There is neither the past nor the future, there is no longer time. We perceive this in the sequences of the trees, the sky, the clouds, the circling birds – these are moments of great purity and simplicity, which each of us knows. The entire short is crossed by music that follows the seasons of life, the emotional ones, and the bicycle, always present, represents the phases: from the uncertainty of childhood to the enthusiasm of adolescence; from the stable balance of maturity to the tired creak of old age. In the story, existence is described to us with the normality of a walk. Michael Dudok de Wit creates his poetics on separation and lack with Father And Daughter, with a few skilful touches. Father and daughter tell of that intimate indissoluble bond that makes us be with those we love beyond death. The director therefore expresses a feeling that is difficult but rather subtle to define: longing. And it is not difficult to perceive it because there are many of us who know it.
The red turtle (La Tartue rouge) is his debut in animated feature film, a film produced by Studio Ghibli (in co-production with the French Prima Linea Productions, Why Not Production and Wild Bunch) which won the Special Jury Prize at the Festival of Cannes 2016 in the Un Certain Regard section and an Oscar nomination in the animation category. The red turtle is a simple and metaphorical work that draws life through its stages (obstacles, discoveries, loneliness, love, parenthood, old age, death) and expresses a profound respect for nature and human nature, conveying a feeling of peace and admiration before his mystery. A revelation suspended between land and sea, between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, The Red Turtle is dramatized with the sole force of drawing, colours, movements, music which interprets and amplifies the purity of the lines. The author silences the word, focusing on the language of action and body, preposing our complex primary instincts. The same ones that push a turtle born on the beach to head towards the sea.
