Animest.19 International Competition: Original productions in four unique sections

89 animations from all over the world in the Feature, Short, Student, and VR Film sections

Ready to enjoy a generous and diverse menu of recent animations? Join the 19th edition of the Animest International Animation Film Festival between October 4-13, 2024 – the only Oscar-qualifying film festival in Romania! This year’s selection will bring Bucharest’s silver screens to life with imaginative tales spun with the most innovative narrative and aesthetic techniques. 44 animated short films are competing for the Animest Trophy and the EUR 2,500 prize offered by the Romanian Cultural Institute, and 32 student films from some of the best animation schools in the world are vying for their dedicated section’s prize. The International Feature Film Competition will mark four national premieres of five original productions, emotional, funny and unique. As usual, VR films also get a dedicated competition – don’t miss the eight competitors! Browse the official Animest.19 competition selections on our official website: www.animest.ro.

“The Animest 2024 competition has curated a collection of stories that vary in their themes, techniques, style, and production, creating a four-continent map of the field of animation this past year, from professional work to student projects. The five productions in the Feature Film Competition put forward five entirely unique perspectives on human relations, time, history, and utopian societies – five potential new favorites for the equally unique Animest audience,” explains Mihai Mitrică, main festival programmer.

Watch the official teaser trailer for the Feature Film section: https://youtu.be/kdEFXo2Msug.

Access the full nominees list here: https://www.animest.ro/en/feature-film-19

“Distinctive in its deceptively abrasive tone and in the wildly out-there swerves of its story,” writes Screen Daily of Ghost Cat Anzu (directed by Yoko Kuno and Nobuhiro Yamashita), competing in this year's Feature Film Competition: the story of Karin, a strong-minded girl sent to live with her monk granddad in the Japanese countryside, and Anzu, the even-more unpredictable phantom feline who becomes her guardian. Based on Takashi Imashiro’s mid-2000s manga of the same name, Ghost Cat Anzu also competed in the Annecy Festival this year, the most prominent animation event in the world.

Kensuke’s Kingdom is another adaptation, this time of  Michael Morpurgo’s beloved 1999 novel about Michael, a kid enjoying a round the world trip with his family – until he and his dog Stella get shipwrecked on a remote island. Who else may be there with them? Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry’s joint feature-length animation debut puts forward memorable characters you are sure to empathize with! Already selected in numerous international festivals (Annecy, Mon Premier Festival, New York International Children’s Film Festival) and winner of multiple awards, this is an impressionistic, candid chronicle of a boy's exploration of what matters most in life.

“In the part of the world where I was born and raised there is nothing important to see and remember, nothing that could be considered worthy of ending up in a book. A sort of ‘Nowhere,’” says Simone Massi as a prelude to his film, winner of the Horizons Award at the Venice Film Festival. Nowhere  is an Italian-Swiss production showing three pivotal moments in the history of contemporary Italy through the experiences of three kids in “nowhere lands:” the Spanish flu epidemic during the Great War, the Nazis taking control of another war-torn homeland, and the turbulent 1960-80’s Years of Lead. These stories travel by word-of-mouth, eventually “etching themselves deep into the collective memory of three generations.”

Hailing from Annecy by way of the World Festival of Animated Film – Animafest Zagreb (where it won the Feature Film Grand Competition), Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Docs Barcelona, and Torino Film Festival, László Csáki’s Pelikan Blue is the first feature-length animated documentary produced in Hungary. Inspired by an idea by Gábor Sipos (producer of Oscar-winning Son of Saul) and a series of 2010 interviews, this unique anidoc explores a dilemma: how can youth from ex-communist Hungary travel to the ever-appealing West when they can’t afford their train tickets? The film is based on the audio recordings of the three protagonists and others, uses the principles of live action film (hunt for the Super8 shots!) and uses 2D animation in a nostalgic reconstruction of the past, complete with a caper-style action made possible, in part, by heated Domestos cleaning liquid, hand-written train tickets, and ten years of dedicated work.

Animest.19’s Feature Film Competition also includes Sultana’s Dream, a Spain-Germany collaboration that won prizes at film festivals in Annecy, San Sebastian, Hamburg, and Zagreb’s Feature Film Competition. Directed by Isabel Herguera, this is the story of Inés, a Spanish artist traveling India after a break-up, who comes upon a 1905 science fiction story about Ladyland: a utopia where women rule and men quietly do chores. Fascinated, Inés travels across the country in search of such a place, in one of the most aesthetically fascinating animations in recent years.

76 shorts, only one Animest Trophy

This year’s winning short film will be eligible for Academy Award selection, making the jury’s mission all the more challenging amid the selection’s parade of animation styles and techniques: Cannes-launched Supersilly (directed by Veronica Martiradonna) and Scars We Love (directed by Raphaël Jouzea), as well as Annecy winners Percebes (directed by Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves – Crystal for Best Animated Feature) and Hurikán (directed by Jan Saska – Audience Award).

Short Film section official teaser trailer: https://youtu.be/q0ix5vVY1xo

Access the full nominees list here:https://www.animest.ro/en/short-film-19

Curious what people are learning in animation schools these days? Watch the Student Film Competition, which includes 32 short films from students at 15 internationally renowned institutions, such as Gobelins, La Poudrière, Royal College of Arts, NFTS (National Film and Television School), CalArts, FAMU, and MOME. Two of these shorts were already praised for their originality at top festivals: Bunnyhood (directed by Mansi Maheshwari) – Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard and Carrotica (directed by Daniel Sterlin-Altman) – Annecy, Best Graduation Film).

Student Film official teaser trailer: https://youtu.be/S4QOwZtp6Yw

Access the full nominees list here:https://www.animest.ro/en/student-competition-19

“The Animest selection is consistently diverse, a gallery of almost all of the visual styles in contemporary animation. Some stories are dense, others breezy; some are anchored in real life, others in pure fantasy; some classic, others hard to categorize; while others range from militant to confessions captured by animated documentaries. We are so thankful to all of the creators who sent in their animated treasures, shared their stories. Every year, we keenly feel the responsibility of drawing the line and closing  the final competition selection, doubled by the privilege of animating Bucharest’s screens with such a rich collection of films,” said Mihai Mitrică.

Eight innovative productions in the VR Competition

This year’s Virtual Reality selection includes several titles that have already completed in prominent festivals, such as the Venice International Film Festival, recognized for consistently attracting some of the best VR productions in the world.

One Venice selection coming to Animest.19 is Oto’s Planet (directed by Gwenael François), where Oto and his pet Skippy are living their lives peacefully, lying in a hammock, eating fruit – until a small spacecraft crashlands on their planet and cosmonaut Exo emerges, starting a 28-minute story about communication and cohabitation between two unwilling roommates who are having some trouble adjusting to their new context.

Another Venice alumnus is Flow (directed by Adriaan Lokman), winner of their 2023 Special Immersive Jury Prize: an immersive 15-minute sequence of moments in a woman’s life portrayed through “the dance of air currents, an interplay of scents, warmth, respiration, and both natural and artificial gusts of wind, [which] render the imperceptible tangible.” This year’s Animest selection also includes a deeply interactive and emotional 40-minute VR production, Emperor (directed by Marion Burger and Ilan J. Cohen) – a journey inside the brain of a father suffering from aphasia and of his daughter, trying to communicate with her dad after he’s lost his ability to speak.

Access the full nominees list here:https://www.animest.ro/en/vr-19

Access www.animest.ro for details about all of the films competing in Animest.19 this year. For a full festival experience with access to any and all screenings, get a pass on the Eventbook platform.

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The Animest Festival is a project of the Animest Association, co-financed by the MEDIA Program of the European Union and AFCN–the Administration of the National Cultural Fund.

Institutional Partners: the Romanian Cultural Institute, The French Institute and the Embassy of France in Romania, Instituto Cervantes, the Italian Cultural Institute, The Austrian Cultural Forum, The “I.L. Caragiale” National University of Theater and Film, the Animation Festival Network (AFN)

Main Media Partner: Radio Guerrilla

Media Partners: Radio România Cultural, Adevărul de Weekend, Zile și Nopți, Observator Cultural, Revista BIZ, Haute Culture, IQAds, Scena9, AGERPRES, Ziarul Metropolis, Revista FILM, Mindcraft Stories, LiterNet, Movie News, CineFAN, HAPP.ro, MunteanuRecomandă, AndreeaVerde, SuntPărinte.ro

Monitoring Partner: mediaTRUST