May 3, 2023

Flora Anna Buda's "27" is in Competition for Short Films at Cannes! Check out the exclusive trailer!

Filmmaker Flora Anna Buda will be presenting her latest short film, "27," at the Cannes Film Festival.

The short film begins with the main character Alice turning 27. An adult by all accounts, she lives with her parents and her nosy younger brother, which makes her feel a bit suffocated. Feeling stuck, she regularly disappears into dreams to escape her boring routine. After a psychedelic party on a factory rooftop, she gets drunk and is involved in a motorcycle wreck.27 - My Last Day at Home (original title) is the profile of "27," which was selected for the 2020 Annecy International Film Festival, and how much it has It is fun to look back now to see how much has changed.

Buda studied animation filmmaking at the prestigious Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest; in 2018, she directed the short film Entropia, which won the GLAS Animation Festival (Grand Prix Special Mention) and Berlin International Film Festival (Best Short Film Teddy), and screened at numerous festivals including.

We spoke with Buda about her latest project, how her work has evolved since "Entropia," and what she hopes to do differently with her next film.

Where did the idea for this story come from? Because I lived with my parents until I was 27 and I wanted to understand as many aspects of that situation as possible.

What was the most difficult part of making this animated short? Because I am not a very articulate person, and when I talk, I get very exposed. So speaking in a film that exists forever was quite a source of stress, but it was also the reason I wanted to take on the challenge. The second big challenge was the coloring process of the film, and I feel responsible for having a great coloring team do a very difficult job with the methods I developed. It was a learning experience for me, so here again I want to thank them and promise to make it easier next time. I would also like to give special thanks to Nadja Andrassef, the production manager/line producer on the Hungarian side.

The film has its psychedelic and surreal moments, but it feels more grounded than "Entropia" and set in a world closer to our own. Was that your goal after shooting "Entropia"? Or is the realism of "27" the result of the story you wanted to tell? Since the protagonist is in the process of accepting reality, I thought it was important to choose a more realistic visual style.

Because it is set in a more realistic world, the environment and character development process was '27-

I was developing another script at the time, and when I started drawing for myself at random, I got pretty stuck. I found some semblance of coherence between the images, but it was quite vague. A few weeks later, at the Animateka Festival in Ljubljana, I spoke with Emmanuel-Alain Reynal, one of the producers of the film. I told him I was stuck on another script, and when I showed him what I was working on, he immediately said, this is the film. I thought, this is it. From that moment on, the process felt very similar. I had an idea, a concept, an image, and then I wrote the script. In general, I wanted to create something different from Entropia, but I still wanted to use my symbol system here and there. That's what I was going for.

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