The exhibition of works by author Hana Tintor evolved through the experience of collaborating with screenwriter and director Marko Dješka on the animated documentary All Those Sensations in my Belly which was part of this year’s selection of Animafest.

The documentary’s point of departure – Anna’s transition from male to female sex/gender – has interwoven, in its intimacy, sensitivity and complexity, the creative work put into this film through intense relations, long conversations and contemplations. By way of Hana’s drawings, the exhibited works present only a small part of this lengthy process. Hana Tintor arranges, via her illustrations, the stories about concrete adolescent experiences and developing one’s own acceptance, the acceptance of others, quests and disappointments, into a holistic and novel artistic story.

Divided into three categories, the works also expose the complex process of the creation of a short-animated film: from the development of certain scenes or characters, through works that ended up in the films to the ones that were ultimately not included. However, direct connections to the film set aside, part of the large-scale works were made as a distinct body inspired by the conversations the author conducted with the film’s protagonist. It is precisely in these, without being restrained by the formal limitations imposed by the film medium, that the full richness of Hana Tintor’s distinct authorial handwriting emerges.

Using simple line drawing, she reacts to the story she was told, capturing its realistic attributes, as well as visceral emotions. She leaves her mark in an intense, but at the same time subtle manner, providing additional vitality to the complex structures of the experience. They reflect an intimate understanding of Anna’s emotional states during the process of spiritual, as well as physical self-identification, and quest for society’s acceptance and love’s requital. Without shying away from dark situations and stressful emotions, which she articulates through expressive splashes of color, and even stains, basking in the sheer opulence of tonal dynamics, the artist truly captures the depth of the experienced conditions.

This kind of inspirational intensity and richness of interpretational capacity find a suggestive place within the medium of animated film, where in spite of an intimate approach to the development of motives, they step out of the state of introspection and develop into an animated image, which precisely underlines the meaning of the documented story. Through the interrelation between the statement, image and movement a space is created, which by way of narrative method, script elements and expressiveness, penetrates (outside of the medium) into the sphere of societal and cultural contextualization of gender and sexual identity, which is an issue that the film’s protagonist Anna will also address as part of the accompanying program.

Author: Hana Tintor

Curators: Iva Gašparović, Marta Kiš (AM Center)

Contributors: Marko Dješka, Anna, Tanja Masnec Šoškić