Jury

Isabel Herguera is a Spanish animation film director with an international background, nominated to Goya Prize. She studied ine Arts at the Universidad del País Vasco and at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. She later earned a master’s degree from Calarts in Los Angeles. In 1997 she founded her own studio Loko Pictures, with which she produced numerous commercials and her animated short The Balloon (2003). She has been director of Animac, the Catalonia International Animated Film Festival, coordinator of the Laboratorio de imágen en movimiento at Arteleku in San Sebastián, professor at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, and now she is professor at the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing and at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.

Wiola Sowa – an animated film director, an academic. Graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Faculty of Graphic Arts and of the Film School in Łódź (doctoral studies). Two times winner of the Scholarship of the Minister of Culture and National Heritage, she is an academic at the Institute of Art and Design at University NEC in Krakow. She makes animated films, but also mixes animation with other genres: documentary and fiction, as well as works in extended reality AR and VR. Her films won over two dozen awards at festivals in Poland and abroad and were screened i.a. in Washington D.C., ìNew York City, London, Paris, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Annecy.

Theodore Ushev (1968, Kyustendil, Bulgaria) first made a name as a poster and graphic designer, before moving to Montreal in 1999. Famous all over the world for his powerful personal style reflecting numerous influences from the visual arts and literature. He makes various mediums collide – painting, collage, photography, live-action film, animation film – creating a polymorphous opus that’s an inspiration for many artists today. In the past 15 years, he has worked for the National Film Board of Canada. His creative biography contains more than 15 films, which brought him over 200 international awards, including an Oscar nomination for best animated short film for Blind Vaysha in 2017 and making it into the short list for the same award for The Physics of Sorrow in 2019. The Physics of Sorrow won the Grand Prize – Crystal of Annecy in 2020, where he has won four times during his career. Phi 1.618 (2022), a dystopian adventure film, is his first live-action feature film.