Animation Pageant World Rocked By Accusations Of Movie Theft For Second Time In Months

When Dimitrov and the Rew Day producers at Miramar movie came upon that their movie was being misrepresented on the pageant scene, they reached out to Cartoon Brew, having simply learn our Snowflake piece a couple of weeks earlier than.
“We realized such circumstances are extra widespread than one would think about, and the matter must be addressed,” Miramar’s Mila Voinikova advised Cartoon Brew.
The corporate has since contacted a number of festivals which have chosen Friday to tell them that it’s neither a brand new nor authentic work. Miramar additionally reached out to movie database web sites reminiscent of IMDB, which has since eliminated the web page for the retitled knock-off, and Filmfreeway, which was getting used to submit the counterfeit model to festivals.

In reaching out, Miramar had two targets: “To verify the fraud with our movie is put to an finish as quickly as doable and to offer sufficient publicity to this case to discourage such makes an attempt with different movies,” mentioned Voinikova. “We now have a saying in Bulgarian that roughly interprets to ‘A lie has brief legs.’”
Dimitrov added, “It’s unhappy that folks suppose that pageant success would carry extra pleasure than the artistic course of. Any small factor an individual does is extra valuable than the one that’s stolen.”
After talking with the Rew Day workforce, we reached out to a number of people who display shorts for festivals and web sites and had been in a position to come up with the model of Friday that’s at the moment being submitted. Having seen each movies, we will affirm that Friday is the precise movie as Rew Day with a brand new title graphic and credit, the latter of that are notably incongruent with the remainder of the movie’s aesthetic.
Within the curiosity of transparency and to bolster their case, Miramar movie has made Rew Day out there to the general public on Vimeo. We’ve linked the movie under, in addition to a number of screenshots we had been in a position to pull from Friday, leaving little question that these are the truth is similar movie.

Cartoon Brew reached out to Serajpour via his e-mail and social accounts, however has not acquired a response. Additional, since we began attempting to contact him, Serajpour has eliminated photos from his Linkedin profile and deleted his Instagram account, which had not too long ago uploaded a shot of him holding a prize that he gained by resubmitting Rew Day as his personal movie.
Though his social media profiles have been largely scrubbed clear, Serajpour might be seen within the under Youtube video selling Field Brief Movie Pageant 2021, the place he was listed because the pageant’s director:
We additionally contacted Filmfreeway for remark. A website consultant replied shortly after our request, thanking us for alerting them to the infraction and saying that that they had deactivated the filmmaker’s account which was related to the venture. No further remark was provided by the consultant.
On the time of this text’s publishing, the Filmfreeway web page for Friday continues to be lively, though Serajpour’s info is now not included.
Finnish director, animator, and illustrator Joni Männistö acknowledged Dimitrov’s movie when he was trying via submissions for the Turku Animated Movie Pageant. He had beforehand met Dimitrov on the Odense Worldwide Movie Pageant in 2012, the place Rew Day gained the Børge Ring Award.
“I used to be fairly stunned to see a screenshot from Svilen’s movie with the submitted movies after so a few years. Besides now it had a brand new title, manufacturing 12 months, manufacturing nation, and it was made by a distinct director,” he advised us.
After rewatching Rew Day to ensure his reminiscence was correct, he began posting about Friday on social media, warning different pageant programmers that somebody was on the market attempting to move off Rew Day as their very own movie.
“I perceive I wasn’t the primary one to note this, so I’m wondering why I hadn’t heard about it already. For choice committees, it is a very troublesome scenario as a result of naturally we haven’t seen all movies all through historical past, and we will’t do background checks for hundreds of submitted movies yearly,” he defined. “The animation group is small, so phrase will get round quick when one thing like this happens. We have to warn one another. For festivals, that is an unlucky and irritating factor, however the authentic filmmaker is the one which must be protected probably the most.”