the “shocking theft” of Snowflake

Russian filmmaker Natalia Chernysheva was stunned recently to learn that her award-winning 2012 short film Snowflake was screening in festivals 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.

De Cola, 33, is an Italian film industry worker who claims to have worked on films like Oz the Great and Powerful, Maleficent, and Isle of Dogs. In the spring of 2022, she began submitting Chernysheva’s film to festivals and claiming it as her own.

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.

In ASIAF 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.”

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.