A masterful parable about the indestructibility of art and also the goodness in man. Using expressive puppets created by Zdeněk Seydl, Pojar develops a poetic drama about a fragile harlequin and a menacing lion, simmering in the scorching haze of a desert oasis. The film won the Grand Prix in Annecy in 1960. —Karlovy Vary International Film Festival
Břetislav Pojar (born October 7, 1923) is a puppeteer, animator and director of short and feature films.
Born in Sušice, Czechoslovakia, Pojar started his career in the late 1940s with his work on The Story of the Bass Cello (1949) based on the story by Anton Chekhov and directed by master Czech puppet animator Jiří Trnka. Pojar served as a puppeteer under his mentor Trnka. Pojar compiled an extensive body of work as a director and animator in Czechoslovakia, where he made films in both puppet animation to the more common stop motion animation.
In the mid-1960s, Pojar emigrated to Canada, where he began a long collaboration with the National Film Board. His Canadian work is some of his best known, and it has won awards at prestigious international film festivals.
Pojar’s work is characterized by strong social commentary, such as in Balablok, where armies of small circle- and square-shaped beings war with each other until they are all wounded into indistinguishable… read more
