At the 17th edition of the international animation festival ANIMANIMA 2023 held in the Serbian town of Čačak, organized by the city’s Cultural Center, from September 19th to 23rd, almost 150 animated films were shown within 13 program units. In the spotlight, as always, was the main competition program, but also the competition program of children’s films, which attracted more than a thousand children to the Great Hall of the Cultural Center.
The “Meet the Animator” program featured Animanima’s main guest, the famous Latin American animator Juan Pablo Saramela. In a series of exciting festival screenings, the audience also had the opportunity to see the special program “Cardboard Fortress: 8 Stories of Freedom”.
Animanima DOCS is a programming segment dedicated to animated documentaries filled with personal confessions or engaging messages from their authors. At the “Contemporary Serbian Animation” screening, new films by local animators were presented.
In the main competition program, 32 short films from 18 countries competed, and the festival awards were decided by a jury consisting of Juan Pablo Saramela (Argentina), Ana Nedeljkovic (Serbia) and Joao Gonzalez (Portugal). The Grand Prize of the Animanima 2023 festival went to Belgian author Levi Stops for the film Floating. The jury explained its decision: “Every couple has some problems. This film found an unusual approach to this subject, through black comedy, ironically connected to everyday human drama”. The jury’s special award went to Flora Anna Buda, an animator from Hungary, for the film 27, “for realizing a story about social taboos and sexual fantasies in an intense and fresh way”, as the jury emphasized. Each member of this jury awarded a special award, so Juan Pablo Saramella opted for the film Rat by the Chinese author Yanqing Cai, Joao Gonzalez for Purple Season directed by Clemence Bouchereau, and Ana Nedeljković for her special recognition chose the film Eva by the Croatian-Estonian authorcouple Lucija Mrzljak and Morten Tšinakova.
The other competition of the Animanima 2023 festival was for children’s films. The youngest festival audience saw 18 films from 14 countries at three matinees, and the films were evaluated by a jury consisting of Aleksander Gracer (Austria), Andrijana Ružić (Italy) and Mate Horešnji (Hungary). School for Christmas Trees was declared the best film in this competition category, and the author from Russia, Anastasia Mahlina, received the AnimanimaKIDS Award. The special recognition of this jury also went to the Russian director, Aleksey Alekseev, for the great comedy Book of Recipes.
Visitors to the main competition program voted for their favorite film, so the Audience Award went to Russian director Max Kulikov, for the film Dear Travelers.