INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM COMPETITION

SARINA NIHEI is an animation director from Japan. Being obsessed with Estonian animation, she decided to pursue a career in animation. She is a graduate of London's Royal College of Art. Her graduation film from the RCA, 'Small People with Hats', won prizes at festivals around the world including the Grand Prize at Ottawa International Animation Festival. Specialising in hand-drawn animation, she makes music videos and short films.

KEIICHI HARA drew widespread praise for his irreverent feature “Crayon Shin- chan: The Storm Called: The Adult Empire Strikes Back” (2001), and won numerous awards in Japan for “Crayon Shin-chan: The Storm Called: The Battle of the Warring States” (2002) and “Summer Days with Coo” (2007). Subsequently became one of Japan’s most globally revered animation auteurs for his body of work, including the Annecy International Animation Film Festival double award-winning “Colorful” (2010), “Miss Hokusai” (2015), and “The Wonderland” (2019). In 2018, he became the third animation director (following Isao Takahata and Katsuhiro Otomo) to receive a Medal with Purple Ribbon, awarded by the Japanese government to individuals who have made great contributions to artistic and academic fields. His work continues to be highly anticipated both at home and abroad. We celebrate his visit to our Festival with a dedicated RETROSPECTIVE.

JOANNA RYTEL graduated in 2004 from the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. She has developed a complex artistry, which always points out our time's most poignant issues of gender, power and identity. She approaches these issues with great integrity, putting the personal at stake, making her form of address accessible to those outside the usual art and film worlds. Some of the controversial topics she explores are honor, racism, feminism, relationships between animals and people, taboos and sexuality in the public sphere, abortion and porn. Considering how loaded these topics are, one might guess that Rytel would handle them with political correctness. Far from it. The politically correct answers are left out, and the reaction becomes stronger when viewers are deprived of their passive role and become a part of the answer.

INTERNATIONAL FEATURE FILM & ANIMATED SERIES COMPETITIONS

JEANETTE NØRGAARD is a Danish award-winning director and animator. Her work is defined by high aesthetics, achieved through traditional hand-drawn techniques integrated with contemporary digital workflows. With a deep love for dreamy universes and quirky characters, she has directed and supervised tv-specials and series screened on Netflix, Danish and Swedish Television and for more than a decade, she has perfected the process of creative collaboration on music videos, fashion gifs, explainers and branded content for clients like Universal Music, WWF, CERN institute and Google as well as on her own films "Leitmotif", "Dog in Heaven" and "Fjer".

SARA GUNNARSDÓTTIR is a director and artist who has created animation, music videos, and original artwork for film and television, including Marielle Heller’s celebrated debut feature “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” and HBO’s Emmy-nominated “The Case Against Adnan Sayed.” Sara was born and raised in Reykjavik, Iceland, where she received her BFA from the Icelandic Academy of the Arts, while creating and performing with the electro punk band Donna Mess. She received her MFA in Experimental Animation from CalArts, and her thesis animated documentary short, “The Pirate of Love,” was nominated for “Best Alternative” in The Academy’s Student Academy Awards. Sara most recently directed the animated comedy “My Year of Dicks,” created by Pamela Ribon (Moana, My Boyfriend is a Bear), for FX Network. The show won Special Jury Awards at SXSW for Unique Vision in Writing and Directing, took home the Crystal for TV Production at Annecy Animation Film Festival and was nominated for Best Animated Short at the 95th Academy Awards.

GINTS ZILBALODIS is a Latvian filmmaker and animator. His debut feature film "Away" which he made entirely by himself won the Best Feature Film Contrechamp Award in Annecy. It has has been selected in more than 85 festivals and sold in 18 territories. His fascination for filmmaking began at an early age watching classic films and making shorts and commercials. Prior to "Away" he made 7 short films in various mediums including hand- drawn animation, 3D animation and live-action and often mixing their characteristic aesthetics. Currently he’s working on his second animated feature - "Flow".

POLISH ANIMATED FILM COMPETITION

ALEXIS HUNOT hadn't discovered the power of cinema made frame by frame before he witnessed it first-hand at the Annecy Film Festival. Having worked as a VHS salesman, VHS distributor, DVD distributor and even Asian products salesman, his professional focus on animation started with a piece for a magazine called Storyboard. More engagements for magazines and TV followed, though neither could offer him the space to talk about animation quite as much as he wanted. For this reason, he created a website dedicated exclusively to animation, zewebanim.com, in 2004. There, he regularly posts news and films but also interviews with important animation personalities. Additionally, he took charge of “Bulles de rêves”, a monthly radio show on animation. He has been teaching image analysis and film history at different animation schools since 2007, and started to organise conferences on a variety of animation-related topics in France, Japan, Egypt and other places. He’s conducting video interviews for the Institut français, collaborates with Forum des images and even creates anniversary videos for animation directors that he puts on the Internet. He is also member of the animation committee of the national film award of France, the César.

ANDRZEJ RADKA swoją karierę w filmie animowanym rozpoczął w 1989 roku zatrudniając się w Hanna Barbera Poland w Bielsku-Białej, gdzie pracował na stanowiskach asystenta animacji, animatora, oraz layout posing. Od 2008 roku pracował przy 17 pełnych metrażach i kilku filmach krótkometrażowych, z czego 7 tytułów zostało nominowanych do Oscara. Między innymi: wspomniany “Secret of Kells”, “Song of the Sea”, “Ernest and Celestine”, “Chico & Rita, Late Afternoon”, “The Breadwinner” i “Wolwalkers”. Od 2019 zatrudniony w Cartoon Saloon jako animation supervisor. Na tym stanowisku pracował przy tworzeniu pełnego metrażu “My Fathers Dragon” w reżyserii Nore Twomey i “Screechers Reach” Paula Younga, odcinka z drugiej odsłony “Star Wars Visions”.

TIM WEBBER started making films at University and left wanting to combine this passion with his outstanding academic record in Maths, Physics and Art, so ended up at a small 15 person company called Framestore one of the first companies to use digital technology to make Pop Promos and Adverts;  Tim was making the tea.  Luckily that was not one of his skills and he was promoted to be a visual effects artist.

With his first VFX Supervising credit on a drama for the genre-creating Mini Series Gulliver’s Travels, he rapidly became the driving force behind the company’s push into Television, developed Framestore’s virtual camera and motion rig systems and winning four Emmy’s for his work.

Moving into Film, Tim has supervised some of the most technically and artistically challenging of projects. These include Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, Spike Jonze’s highly original CG characters in Where the Wild Things Are, and work on James Cameron’s incredible Avatar.

He then had the opportunity to Supervise the VFX on Cuarón’s space thriller, Gravity, for which he won a BAFTA and an Oscar. The groundbreaking techniques developed included the Light Box, which was one of Time magazine's inventions of the year.  But Tim was most proud of his central part in the creative process of making the film such a success.

In 2014 Tim was named in the Sunday Times' 100 Makers of the 21st Century list; was awarded the Royal Photographic Society’s Progress Medal

Tim had directed commercials early in his career, along with some 2nd unit directing on films such as Paddington (and even has a call sheet with Sir John Geilgud’s name he keeps proudly at home) and he has also created short pieces in augmented reality for Warner Brothers and one for Stephen Spielberg.

Having operated at the point where cutting-edge technology, beautiful imagery and first-class storytelling meet for his entire career, "FLITE", Tim’s debut as a writer director, brings these worlds effortlessly together: a thrilling slice of near-future sci-fi, driven by technical innovation and an exciting new production methodology. You can see it as part of the official selection of the INTERNATIONAL SHORT FILM COMEPETITION.