MARIBOR — StopTrik Festival 2026, the 16th edition of Slovenia’s international stop-motion meeting, opens tomorrow, 23 September, and runs through 27 September in Maribor. Zippy Frames’ programme report counts 161 films across competition and panorama strands, with this year’s intellectual spine titled Dead Media — a theme borrowed from Bruce Sterling’s mid-1990s idea of obsolete technologies that once shaped how people communicated and imagined the world.
StopTrik treats that idea as more than nostalgia. Festival notes link shadow theatre, magic lanterns, analogue photography and VHS to a wider question: what stays culturally alive after the devices themselves vanish? In an information climate bent toward speed and resolution, Maribor’s stop-motion community is betting that fragile, hand-made and half-forgotten formats still have something to teach.
Official selection and competition strands
The Official Selection splits into four international competition sections and two non-competitive panoramas. Competitions include Stop Motion Animation (29 films), Stop Motion Animation for Children (18 films) and Borderlands (12 experimental works that mix stop motion with other cinematic forms). Panorama programmes Open Frame (16 films) and Dead Media (11 films) expand the brief beyond pure technique.
Audience juries — adults and children in Maribor — award the Grand Prix and competition prizes; a Maribor Student Jury selects its own winners. That dual audience structure has long been part of StopTrik’s identity: serious craft talk beside family-friendly programmes and late-night entertainment blocks.
Dead Media retrospectives and panels
Two retrospective programmes carry the theme. Dead Media: Fleeting Matters gathers films that engage obsolete or fading animation forms and ask viewers to slow down. Dead Media: In and Out Misinformation Society pushes the metaphor into propaganda, polarisation, algorithmic communication and the mediatization of violence. Both retrospectives are scheduled for reprise screenings at the Slovenian Cinematheque in winter 2027.
On 24 September, the panel “Dead Media Spirit in Audio/Visual Culture” brings Thomas Renoldner (Austria) and Claudia Munksgaard-Palmqvist (Denmark) into conversation about experimental animation as technologies change. A separate panel, “Mainstream Media in the Era of Genocide,” features journalists Kristina Božič and Boris Vasev with historian Assal Rad, author of *The State of Resistance: Politics, Culture, and Identity in Modern Iran*.
Solidarity, workshops and partner festivals
StopTrik’s Solidarity Programme — previously focused on animation artists from Palestine and Ukraine — turns this year to war-torn Sudan via the hybrid documentary *Khartoum* (Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Ibrahim Snoopy, Timea M. Ahmed, Phil Cox), with a conversation between Rawia Alhag and visual anthropologist Prof. Ana Sarah Lunaček Brumen of the University of Ljubljana.
Partner showcases include Beirut Animation Nights (Arab animation), Animest Bucharest (Carte Blanche plus Creepy Animation Night), and Animateka programmes for younger audiences, including the Slovenian co-production *Tales from the Magic Garden*. Workshops run throughout: children’s stop-motion with Melita Sandrin and Domen Sajovic; Miha Reja’s Ad-Hoc Lab collage sessions; and Workshot 2.0 with mentors Max Hattler and Moïa Jobin-Paré under the Dead Media Reloaded brief, organised with eight European art schools and the University of Nova Gorica School of Arts.
Opening week timetable at a glance
Opening night on 23 September pairs the Dead Media: Fleeting Matters retrospective with a courtyard concert by nevem nevem at Vetrinjski dvor. Competition blocks fill 24–26 September; Panorama Dead Media screens on 26 September at 18:00; the closing awards presentation is set for 19:00 on 27 September. Exhibitions include Vuk Jevremović’s *Human Gestures* and Aleksander Andželović’s *PRINTED MOVEMENT – From Digital Sculpting to 3D Printing*.
For Idea-minded readers — not only animation specialists — StopTrik 2026 is a working seminar on how cultural memory attaches to dying formats. If you follow debates about misinformation, archival fragility or craft versus automation, Maribor’s five days are a concrete place to watch those arguments move frame by frame.