Jury 2025

Iranian-Canadian independent animator and visual artist, he is focused on expressive language of visual art, moving image and abstract story telling. He works with traditional mediums for animation as well as painting, drawing and collage, and explores contemporary visual languages. His movies were presented in many different film festivals all around the world, from Seattle International Film Festival to Animafest Zagreb; his collaboration with the Canadian National Film Board has recently landed into the production of In The Shallows (2024), his latest work, in the main competition of Animaphix 2024 together with Woman (2023), co-directed by Gilnaz Arzpeyma.

Independent animation filmmaker who also directed commercials for the American and Japanese market. His animated shorts Rope Dance (1986), Spectators (1989), Crossroads (1991), Passage (1994) and The Message (2000) have won many international awards including the Prix du Jury in Annecy, two times the Bundesfilmpreis, Filmband in Gold (Bonn), Silver Dragon (Cracow) and Grand Prix for animation (Montreal). His films and drawings were exhibited in galleries and institutions worldwide. Recently he exhibited drawings and animation in Lisbon at the Sociedade Nationalde Belas Artes at Monstra-Animation-Festival. Before he had exhibitions at UPV-Valencia, Fuzhong F15-museum for animation and documentary in New Taipei City, at the Institut Français in Meknes Morocco, in Gori Georgia and several times in Berlin. He taught at the University of Minas Gerais, Brasil, he was Full-Time Faculty at the California Institute of Art and from 2006 to 2016 he has been Faculty of the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. He also worked at the research department of the Institut National d’Audiovisuel in Paris. Till 2021 was guest professor at the Taipei National School of the Arts. In 2022 he was artist in residence in the Abbey of Fontevraud to script a new short film, a film he is currently working on.

Director, teacher and visual artist graduated from Bogotá (2018), she participated in the Cinema Di Tella Program in Buenos Aires (2019). She is the founder of POROSA Animación, a Latin American collective of authorial animation. Her cinematographic research focuses on the body, intimacy and plasticity of the frame-by-frame drawing. Sometimes Two Herons (Annecy Film Festival, 2018) and Ruido (FICCI, 2019) were her first short films made in an academic context. La Perra is her first professional animation, produced by Evidencia Films and June Films, nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival; it won the award for best short film in Animated Painting at Animaphix 2023. She is currently developing La Jorobada, her next short film.