Radio Dolores

Animation ” Radio Dolores ” was created during 2016 in our Prague studio. It had it´s premiere in the Tampere International Film Festival 2017, where it won the Prize of the Youth Jury.

” Radio Dolores ” was just selected to the Annecy Animation Festival of 2017 to it´s Main Competition.

The Kafka Trilogy

Three independent puppet animations based on the novels of Franz Kafka are all taking place in the same attick flat – but during different times and with various protagonists.

1. RIDER ON THE BUCKET, 8 min.
A poor violonist is trying to stay alive in his cold room with his only friend- a sick mouse. When the coal bucket is definitely empty, the winter bites the attick tenants hard, and the only way to survive is to try to make a deal with the wealthy coal merchant in the downtown. (For all age groups)

2. THE CHAMBERSTORCH, 8 min.
In the same attick room we now meet with an introvert poetress who only wants to stay alone with her books. But one day, when she comes home from the antiqvariat, a huge egg is humming at her table. When a furious, hungry little bird is born, the poetress is helpless- untill she finds out, how to make a contract for the benefit of them both. (For all age groups)

3. THE COUNTRY DOCTOR, 15 min.
The last part of the thrilogy is an allegory of Sarajevo under the siege: now the attick room has turned into the playground of war-time smugglers and criminals. In the middle of drunken gamblers a young boy is dying, and a helpless doctor is a looser too.

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Awarded with numerous prizes including the Silver Bear of Berlin Film Festival 1996, this film was the first one where Katariina Lillqvist combined animation and documentary elements.

Animation and History

Two films about the Finnish Civil War 1918

Camera Cagliostro has a strong tradition in producing animated films for adult audiences too. Especially through puppet animation, it is possible to deal with the hard and emotional topics like the stories from the Finnish Civil War of 1918, which was one of the cruellest in the history of Europe.

Animation and History: Mannerheim and the Death puppets

Director Katariina Lillqvist was born in Tampere, which was the central battlefield of the Civil War. Still during her schoolyears in the 70`s, the war history officially remained as a taboo- but every childen still knew, on which side of the war their grandparents fighted. The mass graves were unlabelled, but the stories and songs survived, and finally the third generation felt a strong desire to deal with the censored thematics through art and literature.

So did Lillqvist too, and her film ” The Maiden and and the Soldier “ ( 1995 ) was her first attempt to unveil the secrets of the war. The story was based on the memories of the director´s grandmother, but the visual style and the ballad-like dramatisation was still leaning towards the more folkloristic genre.

The maiden and the soldier Puppet movie

On ” Far Away from Ural “ ( 2008 ), Lillqvist worked with the thematics more directly: the film is based on interviews and authentic archive materials from the battle of Tampere during spring 1918. Together with Finnish writer Hannu Salama, she collected the stories for almost six years, and the first version of the ” Ural ” was a radio feature for Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE at 2006.

Although the radio feature was more controversial than the film, only the visual version caused the biggest scandal ever in the history of Finnish animation. This was mostly due to one single picture, which was prematurely published in Finnish yellow newspaper Iltalehti in March 2008. In the picture, a puppet alteration of Finnish first president Mannerheim is posing in a a velvet corset together with his Kirghis lover, a servant boy who later died mysteriously in Finland. Speaking openly about homosexuality of one of the most mythological heroes in the modern Finnish history , though it was not the main topic of the film, was still too much for the conservatives and extreme Lutherans of the North : the film caused a heated debate in all Finnish medias, the nation was again divided into two opposite parties, and a parlamentary request on the censoring of the film was made in April 2008 by the Christian Democrats.