La mort n’existe pas (Death Does Not Exist) and Il burattino e la balena take top prizes at OIAF 2025

ASIFA International 65th Anniversary Best Non-Narrative Award

Winner: Green Lung (dir. Simon Hamlyn)

Jury Comment: We loved how this film used colour, sound and inventive technique to engulf the viewer in its world. The filmmaker demonstrates how experimental animation can lead to surprising outcomes.

Animation Mentor Best Narrative Short Award

Winner: Rakugaki (The Graffiti) (dir. Ryo Orikasa)

Jury Comment: This film immediately transported us into a story about the disintegration of language. It employs multiple techniques in the representation of a city, which becomes language and then loses it. It left us with the question – what is consciousness without language?

Best Commissioned Animation

Winner: Desi Oon (dir. Suresh Eriyat)

Jury Comment: We loved this film for its playful use of materials, creating an unapologetically over-the-top musical centred on an unassuming subject.

Bento Box Award for Best Student Animation

Winner: Anklebones (dir. Nicole Altan)

Jury Comment: This film takes a self-assured approach to exploring a subject related directly to the filmmaker’s heritage. It employs plasticity of line and works with inventive forms, immersing us in an immediate experience

TVPaint Canadian Student Award

Winner: Lullaby for a Deathdream (dir. Charlie Galea-McClure)

Comment: A lyrical meditation on saltwater and remembrance—an atmosphere-driven work whose mixed-media textures linger like a final breath.

Honourable Mention: Music in My Pocket (dir. Veronika Kostyuk) Comment: A beautifully made, surprisingly mature sand animation skimming an old musician’s memories—growth, exploration, love, passion, war, creation—flashing past with the breathless speed of a life

Honourable Mention: When the Moon Sings (dir. Jesu Medina)

Comment: Ambitious, mysterious, and haunting—poetic, with a tinge of the theatrical.

Animation for Teen Audiences 13+ Competition

Winner: Autokar (dir. Sylwia Szkiłądź)

Animation for Young Audiences 7+ Competition

Winner: Les bottes de la nuit (The Night Boots) (dir. Pierre-Luc Granjon)

Honourable Mention: Omedodeedu (Edu’s Fear) (dirs. Bruno Mazzilli and Tiago Judas)

Animated Series Competition

Winner: Eggland (dirs. Cole Kush and Christopher Rutledge)

Comment: ​​For its striking design that mirrors its protagonists’ awkward stillness and for championing an older perspective too often overlooked. With a deliberately languid tempo, it reflects a community’s slow, fractured fade—days blur, time slips, the world feels like a waiting room to the afterlife.

Honourable Mention: Common Side Effects ‘Pilot’ (dir. Camille Bozec)

Comment: For its deft mix of deadpan and absurdist comedy and its timely critique of a corrupt, profit-over-people system

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