Sitting down with…Daria Kashcheeva

With an almost absurd amount of festival wins for her two short films, Daria Kashcheeva’s scooped up more awards recently than I’ve had hot dinners. The Czech-based director and animator is the creative mind behind student Oscar winning Daughter (2019), and her Master’s degree film Electra (2023) that premiered at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Daria’s unorthodox film style and astute insights into the industry make her the perfect candidate for this week’s sit down. 

Daughter is a silent, puppet animation that has the same haunting yet poignant quality I remember feeling the first time I watched Coraline as a child. However, it is made unique by Daria’s use of hand-held camera movement, a rarity for stop-motion film. Electra on the other hand gains its distinctiveness from what she terms a ‘pixilation combination’, where we see a mixture of animation and live actors in a single shot. Daria speaks a lot of the importance of the ‘language’ of animation, and the language she has developed in this film is undeniably evocative and idiosyncratic.  

The ability to remove the film process from the constraints of reality as enforced by live action, is one of the things that entices Daria to the animated world. The possibility of producing a new visual discourse is unsurprisingly attractive to film makers, especially those dabbling in parallel or fantasy worlds, and she cites this as a potential reason that animated films seem to consistently do so well at film festivals. And she is keen to develop her own animation/live-action hybrid language more in her future work.  

But how does one start forging an entire new ‘language’ through which to convey their art? Daria answers this simply: intuition. Of course, we think of intuition primarily as a gut feeling rather than one of conscious reasoning, but Daria insightfully speaks of the step before this impulse. We gain the ability to have these instincts, she explains, by pulling inspiration from the tapestry of everything we have previously consumed that rattle around in our subconscious.  

“Electra” (2023)

For Daria, the process of developing creative instincts looks like watching, reading and listening as she can, and not limiting herself only to the animated world. She tries to attend as many film festivals as possible, and whilst she admits that of course she is not inspired by everything that she watches, exposure to a plethora of styles and choices helps foster your own taste and direction. Eventually, she clarifies, you will see your taste being changed by this accumulation but won’t necessarily be able to put a finger on how or when.  

And like us, Daria also feels that student films get an unfair reputation. In a lot of ways, student film is less about budget and slick professionalism, and more about just making art for art’s sake. She speaks of it as potentially being more free. As well as making me feel better about the amount of film and TV I watch, Daria’s insights make me eager to see as many student animations as possible during this year’s Watersprite weekend. And I wish her yet only more success as she continues to reconfigure the boundaries of animation, and filmmaking in general. 

Written by Lorelei Booth, Tess Bottomley