Coincidence, a strange case, or perhaps destiny made that the couple from Indonesia and the guy from Poland met one day, talked 3 hours and almost immediatelly decided that they would do together an international animation festival in Indonesia. And this is how the story of CRAFT was started.

More than 300 movies from 55 countries of all continents have been submitted for the first edition of the CRAFT International
Animation Festival in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. After very careful viewing of each movie, I decided to qualified 50 movies from 31 countries to the INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF TRADITIONAL & STOP-MOTION ANIMATION, 11 movies from 6 countries to the
SOUTHEAST ASIA COMPETITION OF DIGITAL AND NON-DIGITAL ANIMATION, 18 movies from 14 countries to the KIDS MIX COMPETITION and 30 movies from 18 countries to the DIGITAL WORLD PANORAMA (noncompetitive). For everyone who will come to our festival we prepared even more: the silhouette animation workshop and Masterclass with Tessa Moult-Milewska – one of our Jurors, a visual lecture about history of Polish animation conducted by Piotr Kardas, a special screening of one of the greatest feature-length animations from the beginning of the 21st century – Brazilian THE BOY AND THE WORLD (2013) directed by Alê Abreu, and the “animated masterpiece of all time” – TALE OF TALES (1979), created by the Russian Animation Master – Yuriy Norshteyn.

I hope that CRAFT becomes an important platform to meetings, sharing experiences, and maybe also beginning of cooperations for artist from Southeast Asia. I belive, that our festival will be also a precious sources of drawing inspirations by show
the limitless possibilities of animation. Our main goal is to stimulate a visual awareness and imagination of young artists, and share with the viewers unforgettable emotions, experiences and positive energy. CRAFT is a celebration of craftsmanship and talent,
but also authenticity, diversity and physical spirituality. And remember: nothing is impossible, if you believe in your dreams.

– Piotr Kardas (Program Director)