Short stop motion puppet film directed by Martin Smatana, produced at Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and premiered at Berlinale in 2015. Once upon a starry night, a small boy with the head full of fantasies witnesses dreamlike circus performances. Dazed by endless chain of glittering attractions he realizes that the price for a ticket to the fantastic circus tent is too high and gate between reality and dream is closing. Rosso Papavero was originally designed as a semestral exercise on the various types of walking, which we were assigned in the first year at the Academy. I wanted to show various types of walking in the setting of a circus, where a parade of circus performers comes to the stage. I came up with idea of a circus caravan as a dream-like fantasy of a boy. He lets himself be carried away by his own imagination, which he can´t escape, and even doesn´t want to. Children create their own, idealized world, which is better, more colourful and exciting than reality itself. But where is a border of imagination that a child should not cross? This is the idea that I wanted to explore in this film. Boy whose reality is transformed by his own imagination.

Directed by Martin Smatana