“I am tremendously pleased that Sundance will be screening not one but two Czech animated films from our school. I’m so glad Czech animation is experiencing this wave of success and that I can be a part of it. It’s encouraging,” says Daughter director Daria Kashcheeva.

“Sundance was great news for us — coming as it did while we were working through the night, it raised our morale at least 300 percent! We’re very excited about having our American premiere at the biggest festival in the US, which is also one of the most popular in the world. We keep an eye on the festival’s selection every year, and we appreciate that Sundance has always given a lot of attention to animated shorts. And the fact that there are two animated films from FAMU there this time is fantastic," say Michaela Mihályi and Dávid Štumpf, the directors of SH_T HAPPENS.

In September, director Daria Kashcheeva’s film Daughter was chosen from over 1,600 films from around the world to receive a Student Oscar. At the start of the summer, it took two awards at the world’s largest festival of animated film in Annecy, France — and awards keep rolling in from festivals all over the world. In January, the film received an Oscar nomination. Daughter was produced with the support of the Czech Film Fund as part of the Trojhlas project.

The second Czech animated short that will be at this year’s Sundance — from directors Dávid Štumpf and Michaela Mihályi, SH_T HAPPENS — premiered in September at the Venice Film Festival, in the Orizzonti section for innovative and new forms of cinematic expression. This marked the first appearance of a Czech film in this section of the Venice Biennale. Štumpf and Mihályi’s film also received support for animated production from the Czech Film Fund.

Sundance, organized under the auspices of actor, director, and producer Robert Redford, is the biggest festival of independent film in the United States. Equal in importance to the world’s three biggest festivals — in Cannes, Venice, and Berlin — it has been held in the small town of Park City, Utah, since 1978. Sundance has five competition categories and its main objective is to discover new talent. Czechs have enjoyed success at the festival over the years, with Bohdan Sláma’s Four Suns premiering in competition there in 2012, and the short film Peacock, by director Ondřej Hudeček, winning the Special Jury Award for Best Direction in 2016.