The animated short film 'The Magician,' written, directed and produced by Bogdan Muresanu, will have its world premiere in France, at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival, which will take place between June 8 and 14.

According to a press release sent to AGERPRES on Thursday, 'The Magician' is the only Romanian title in the official competition, which includes 35 international titles, productions and co-productions from more than 17 countries.

In his first animated short film, Bogdan Muresanu tells a short story whose action takes place in Sulina, in 1910.

The first power plant in this Romanian port city is inaugurated. Amid the jubilation of a modern and cosmopolitan crowd, Ilarion, a magician from the past, tries to play his last card, according to the film's presentation.

The script is based on a story published in the short story volume 'Erata' by Bogdan Muresanu, but several years passed between the story, which was not set in Sulina, initially, and the script where he relocated the events in this space (...). Bogdan Muresanu imagined 'a day in the life of a conjurer who is confronted by a new world, that of electricity, which brings with it another type of magic, that of modernity,' and chose to express this story in an animation, precisely to stimulate the imagination and to make viewers imagine what the experience of the inhabitants of Sulina was like when they first saw a light bulb on their streets, the press release states.

'I wanted to revive a fallen world and the animation technique allowed me to recreate, from photographs, the settings in which the film's action takes place, but I also wanted to get to the essence of the story. And here I believe that animation was a medium that suited my intentions: not to illustrate the glory of a bygone world, through the fate of a port, once exuberant and cosmopolitan, and now reduced to the dimensions of a forgotten town, but to represent the substance of the story that I wrote many years ago (...) The film, especially the animated one, which is supposed to be a total visual invention, must produce an image that, at best, will then remain hanging on the walls of those 'dark corridors' in the viewer's mind,' said Bogdan Muresanu.

Mihnea Buzatu, Octavian Chiriac, Alexei Gubenco, Alexandru Pop worked on the film's animation. The voices belong to actors Cosmin Sofron, Mihai Gruia Sandu, Ionut Achivoaie, Ioana Flora, Luca Toma, Olimpia Melinte, Valeriu Andriuta, Dana Vulc, Claudiu Trandafir, Stefan Velniciuc, Constantin Florescu, Virgil Aioanei, Ionut Grama, Adriana Titieni, Constantin Barbulescu, Tudor Istodor, Oltin Hurezeanu, Sebastian Ioan Lungu.

Bogdan Muresanu is the screenwriter, director and producer of the feature film 'The New Year That Never Was,' nominated in 2024 for the European Film Awards (European Discovery 2024 - Prix FIPRESCI).

The film 'The New Year That Never Was' won 10 trophies at the Gopo Awards, four of which went to Bogdan Muresanu - Best Feature Film, Best Debut Film, Best Direction, Best Screenplay. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Petronius Craiu, EN - writing by: Cristina Zaharia)