Encounters 20/20: Lightbox featuring Yoni Goodman (‘The Congress’, ‘Waltz With Bashir’)
Continuing our coverage of the Encounters Festival‘s 20th edition, in this episode of Lightbox Skwigly talks with acclaimed Israeli Animation Director Yoni Goodman, festival guest and jury member, about his work on the award-winning films Waltz With Bashir & The Congress (directed by Ari Folman).
Starring House of Cards actor Robin Wright as a version of herself the Hollywood studio system has grown to find fickle and intolerable, The Congress envisions a world where retired performers are able to be digitally scanned so that their CG likenesses can be animated in whatever roles the studios wish them to play. After Wright agrees to the process so that she can focus on raising her ailing son, we fast-forward 20 years where the Futurist Congress is taking place and a plan to lull society into a hallucinogenic stupor is underway. The Toon Boom animated film, also starring Paul Giamatti, Harvey Keitel and Danny Huston as the brilliantly villainous studio exec Jeff, is loaded with homages to the dawn of animation, is a metaphysical tale of societal dissolution loosely based on Stanisław Lem’s book The Futurological Congress.
Yoni Goodman’s career also includes the Folman-directed documentary series The Material That Love Is Made Of and several short films Closed Zone, The Gift and The Story of Cholera.
The full interview can be heard in episode 24 of the Skwigly Podcast.
Read our review of The Congress here
For more about the film visit thecongress-movie.com
To see more of Yoni Goodman’s work go to yonigoodman.co.il
Produced, presented and edited by Ben Mitchell
Interview conducted by Ben Mitchell
Thanks to Kellie Hasbury & Kieran Argo