A bizarre and troubling situation has been exposed on the film festival circuit: Russian animator Natalia Chernysheva’s award-winning 2012 short film Snowflake (Снежинка) has been making the rounds once again — under a fabricated new title and director. Plagiarized as Away from Home by “Brunella De Cola,” the film has been submitted to festivals and has “received some recognition” according to an update from ASIFA.
Officials at the animation org applauded the animation community for unmasking the “shocking theft” and requested “all festivals to remove the stolen film from their programming, to retract material published on-line that have the wrong title and wrongly credit the plagiarist, and to offer an apology to the original director.” Many festival websites have already complied, and the distributor has removed the imposter film from its catalog.
Letter from ASIFA President Deanna Morse:
Dear members of the animation community,
In the past two days, we were surprised to learn of an unbelievable situation. The sensitive and stunning international award-winning animation by Natalia Chernysheva, Snowflake (original Russian title: Snejinka), made in 2012, was co-opted by another person and presented as if it was a new original animation.
Snowflake won dozens of international festival awards and has been on Vimeo and YouTube. With a distinctive look and color palette, this was the debut film for Natalia, and it is a powerful story. Natalia continues to animate and create art today. She continues to receive recognition for her artistic work.
We are shocked that an animation work of art would be so blatantly … well, there is no other word for it but … stolen. It is incredible that a person could even think this is possible.
Our animation community stands behind the rights of animation artists.
Our animation community supports each other.
We abhor this situation, where the work of an artist is not respected.
We stand with Natalia, and ask others to be aware of these kinds of possibilities and situations …
With all respect and gratitude for Natalia. With all respect and gratitude for the animation artists around the globe who continue to create original and beautiful animation art.
In their own joint statement shared by PÖFF (Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Estonia), one of the high-profile cinema contests that accepted the purloined pic, Away from Home‘s distributor Zen Movie (based in Italy) and “producer”/agent A Little Confidence explained the stunning situation from their perspective, expressing their “absolute extraneousness and profound surprise.” The statement (edited for style and spelling) reads:
On April 19,2022 Ms. Brunella De Cola provided the Agent [A Little Confidence] with the short film which was already complete, fully realized in all of its parts, giving full guarantees that she was its producer, author and director, while only later did the Agent propose to Zen Movie to take care of the festival career of the short film; Zen Movie, after watching the short film, accepted such assignment and located the work in its catalogue called “Tiny Distribution.”
In specifying that Ms. Brunella De Cola is still affirming herself as the owner of the rights of the film, the undersigned, given the adverse revindications, have decided to immediately stop the distribution of the short film and to withdraw all the submissions already made to festivals.
The undersigned, insofar as it is within their respective competences, will adopt, in every area of their activity, the most appropriate solutions in order to shed light on the effective chain of rights of the short film and, if necessary, will take any further action aimed at protecting their interests and professional reputation.
Willing to restore the trust in the professional activity that we carry on with seriousness and love, we send the best regards.
Natalia Chernysheva has gone on to create several more internationally recognized animated shorts, including Le Retour (The Return; 2013), Deux Amis (Two Friends; 2014), Rosa & Dara (2015), The Gossamer (2016) and Spider Web (2017).
A Brunella De Cola is credited on IMDb as a concept artist, VFX artist and assistant art director on a number of feature films, including Isle of Dogs, Maleficent and Spider-Man: Far from Home. It is not known whether this is the same person who claimed rights to the so-called Away from Home short.
Watch Snowflake by Natalia Chernysheva in full:
