Festival Jury
Main Competition Jury
Waltraud Grausgruber
Waltraud Grausgruber is the festival directress and co-founder of the Tricky Women/Tricky Realities Festival in Vienna, Austria, that focuses on animated works created by women and/or gender queer artists and therefore fills a unique position within the international festival landscape. It has been taking place since 2001. Waltraud studied theatre, film, and media studies at the University of Vienna and tourism at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. She wrote her Master’s thesis on African Cinema and was a visiting researcher in France, Senegal, and Burkina Faso. She has conceptualized film festivals, curated national and international (animation) film programs, and served as a jury member at several festivals, and has also published books such as Tricky Women_Animations Film Kunst von Frauen / Women in Animation with Schüren Verlag. In 2010, she received the Outstanding Artists Award for Women’s Culture from the Austrian Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture. She is part of Calliope-Join the Dots, a project that presents women who inspire through their actions.
Christian Gasser
Christian Gasser is a researcher in cultural and media studies, lecturer in the animation department at the Lucerne University of Design, Film and Art, award-winning journalist for radio stations and print media in Switzerland and Germany and a writer of novels and short stories. He is co-publisher and editor of the comic magazine STRAPAZIN and regularly publishes reviews and essays on animated film, comics/graphic novels and pop music. Christian curates exhibitions and animated film programs, hosts panel discussions and sits on juries and Swiss film funding commissions. Among his last book publications are animation.ch. Vision and Versatility in Swiss Animated Film (as book and enhanced e-book), Comics Deluxe, Chris Ware. Paper Life and the novel Rakkaus! (Finnish: Love).
Vojin Vasović
Vojin Vasović completed his MA studies at the Center of Theater, Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto and BA studies in TV directing at the "Sava Mrmak" department of the Academy of Arts in Belgrade. He is artistic director and director of the Ars Mechanica, an experimental troupe that successfully performs in Europe and Canada. He directed over 40 theater plays in Serbia and Canada. His films Breathtaking, Group Portrait from the Back, 5 Minutes Each, Twice Upon a Time, Just For The Record were selected at more than 150 international film festivals winning more than eighty awards worldwide, as well as distribution on HBO Europe channels. Vojin is the producer and director of the To Blink Animation studio, a film company based in Kragujevac and Toronto, as well as the artistic director of Animond, private investment fund for animation. Since 2017, he has been teaching film direction and animation film direction at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade.
Films for Children Jury
Julia Ocker
Julia Ocker is an animation director, designer aund author from Stuttgart. She studied Visual Communciation in Pforzheim and Cairo from 2003 to 2005 and Animation at the Filmakademie in Baden-Württemberg from 2006. Her graduation film Kellerkind won the First Steps Awards 2012, the Tricky Women Prize 2013 and was nominated for the 2014 Annie Awards. Julia discovered her passion for children's movies as she had the opportunity to produce five short films with Studio FILM BILDER for the SWR series, I know an Animal. From these five short films her own series Animanimals was created, it then went on to be shown on KiKa and sold to more than 180 international territories. As every episode works as a short film they have run in many festivals worldwide and won more than 70 awards. Animanimals won the 2019 Grimme-Preis in the children's film category and was nominated for an International Emmy.
Jelena Oroz
In 2008, Jelena Oroz (1987) completed her BA in fine arts at the Academy of Arts in Osijek. In 2014, she graduated from the Department of Animated Film and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, where she now works as an assistant professor. Her films Two for two (2018) and Letters from the edge of the forest (2022) were screened and awarded at numerous international film festivals. She illustrated two picture books; Letters at the end of the forest and Carpet on a spit. She is the author of the visuals and credits for the 2021 Animafest world festival of animated films.
Marija Vulić
Marija Vulić was born in 1972 in Prokuplje, Serbia. She graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade, Department of Applied Sculpture. Marija is the editor of the art program at the Cultural Center of Jagodina and the artistic director of the European festival of animated films for children and young people – Animator fest. Founder of the animated film school for children and young people at the Jagodina Cultural Center, as well as the "JaFilm" association. Author of the short animated film Elusiveness from 2020.
