Ruben Brandt, Collector

Milorad Krstić was born in Slovenia, has lived in Budapest for decades, and worked as a painter and installation artist before making his first feature at sixty-six. Ruben Brandt, Collector took the Grand Prix at Animafest Zagreb and two prizes at Seville, and it looks like nothing else in European animation.

Brandt is a therapist whose dreams are invaded by figures out of art history. Four of his patients — a cat burglar, a bodyguard, a hacker and a former boxer — conclude that possessing the paintings will end the nightmares, and set about lifting works by Botticelli, Hopper, Warhol, Manet and Velázquez from the Louvre, the Tate, MoMA and the Uffizi, pursued by a private detective. The design borrows openly from cubism and surrealism: characters have faces in two planes at once, eyes on the same side of the head, bodies assembled out of quotations. Estimates of the number of art-historical references embedded in the film run past a hundred.

It is a heist picture, a chase and a very sly essay on what it means to want to own an image. Krstić spent years on it with a small Hungarian team, and its cult has grown steadily since: an animated film for adults that is genuinely about painting rather than merely painted, and one of the most inventive things Hungarian cinema has produced this century.