The school of documentary animation at the Rudnik Debut Documentary Film Festival in Sviyazhsk appeared along with the festival itself on the initiative of Marina Razbezhkina in 2017. The ten-day summer crash course, where students conceive and make their short documentary cartoons, was started as a project where not only animators could participate, but anyone who submitted an interesting application for a film. Over the years, young documentary filmmakers and game developers, journalists, writers and screenwriters, artists and designers, theater people, teachers and, of course, animators from all over the country have taken the course. They enriched each other’s experience and expanding the general understanding of animation. The breadth of topics chosen by the participants of the school is also impressive: from the most intimate, personal, related to family, illness, the search for identity, to those that speak of great historical cataclysms and social problems. From the very beginning, the school’s teachers were animation and theater critic Dina Goder, screenwriter Alexander Rodionov, artist and animation director Evgenia Zhirkova; later the teachers were Sonya Gorya and Maria Kogan-Lerner, who had previously taken the course themselves, as well as Mikhail Soloshenko. In total, since 2017, there have been six courses: not in 2020 due to the pandemic, but two in 2021 — the second one as part of the Kinoproba festival in Ekaterinburg. In 2022, it was decided not to hold the Rudnik festival, but the School of Documentary Animation was organized, with more participants than ever before.