News

Imagine a shrink being driven nuts by characters from 13 of the world’s most famous paintings, each of whom want to attack him. That’s the premise of this mesmerizing mindbender and the fiction feature debut of Slovenian-born artist Milorad Krstic, who’s starting his potently promising film career at the ripe young age of 66. Produced in Hungary, this English-language film thrusts us into the world of Ruben Brandt (voiced by Ivan Kamaras), a psychotherapist with nightmares he can’t explain or control. In the first dream scene, set on...

“Possess your problems to conquer them.” That’s the credo psychotherapist Ruben Brandt preaches to his criminally-inclined clients in this stylish, fast-paced, English-language animated thriller for adults. But when Brandt’s patients help him to apply his own advice, he becomes “Ruben Brandt, Collector,” ringleader of a gang responsible for the theft of 13 of the world’s most famous paintings. In this entertaining romp, his fiction feature debut, multi-hyphenate Milorad Krstić literally . Further festival play is a given, with niche distribution a solid bet for most territories.

Brandt (Iván Kamarás) is the offspring of an East German émigré whose knowledge of subliminal programming with 16mm film was exploited by the CIA — and used to experiment on his own son. Since the recent death of his father, Brandt is troubled by powerful auditory and tactile hallucinations in which characters from famous paintings attack him. For example, in one nightmare, the Infanta...