Festival Jury
Main Competition Jury
Juan Pablo Zaramella
Juan Pablo Zaramella was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He graduated at the Avellaneda Film Institute as an Animated Film Director. His professional career began by combining his work as an illustrator with the making of his own independent short films, which were recognized throughout the world. He loves exploring different techniques and aesthetics, using mainly stop motion. His best-known work is Luminaris, a pixilation short film which received 328 awards, being the Guinness Record for the most awarded short in 2018. In 2016 he made the series The Tiniest Man in the World, a 53 episodes co-production between France and Argentina. He is currently developing a stop motion feature film, called I am Nina.
Ana Nedeljković
Ana Nedeljkovic graduated and received her doctorate in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She deals with animated film, visual art and education in the field of contemporary art. Her first animated film Rabbitland (2013), co-directed with Nikola Majdak, was awarded the Crystal Bear at the Berlinale, and was screened at over a hundred festivals around the world. Their second film Untravel (2018) also screened at numerous festivals including Berlinale, Annecy and Sundance, was Oscar-eligible and was nominated for an Annie Award in Los Angeles. Their third animated film About Money and Happiness (2022) was screened at the Locarno and Annecy festivals, and is being screened at numerous festivals around the world. Currently, they are developing project for a feature-length animated film New Rabbitland.
João Gonzalez
João Gonzalez (1996) is a Portuguese film director, animator, illustrator and a musician with classical training in piano. Recipient of a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, he did a Masters at the Royal College Art (UK), after finishing his BA at ESMAD (PT). In these institutions he made award winning films Nestor and The Voyager. In 2022 he became the first Portuguese animation filmmaker to be awarded at Festival de Cannes, winning the Prize for Best Short film in competition at the Critics Week with Ice Merchants, which also became the first ever Portuguese film to be nominated for an Oscar, and the second to win the Annie Award. He has a big interest in combining his musical background with his practice in authorial animation, always taking the role of composer and sometimes instrumentalist in the films he directs, occasionally setting them to a live performance.
Films for Children Jury
Alexander Gratzer
While studying painting at the Institute of Fine and Media Arts at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (2012 to 2018), Alexander Gratzer decided in 2015 to create animated short films largely directed them independently. Further studies led him to the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Budapest, where he graduated with the film In The Upper Room in 2021. He lives in Vienna as a freelance artist and passionate hobby table tennis player.
Andrijana Ružić
Andrijana Ružić graduated in History and Criticism of Art at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy where she fell in love with the medium of animation. She specialized in History of Animated Film under Giannalberto Bendazzi's mentorship. In the period from 2012 to 2019 she has been a program curator of the animated film section at the International Comics Festival in Belgrade, Serbia. She is the member of the Selection board of Animafest Scanner, the international symposium for contemporary animation studies held annually at the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest in Zagreb, Croatia. She writes about animation and other arts for Belgrade weekly magazine Vreme and is the author of the book Michael Dudok de Wit - A Life in Animation (CRC Focus).
Máté Horesnyi
Máté Horesnyi graduated from Budapest Metropolitan University’s animation bachelor’s programme in 2018 with his multi-awarded black&white short Jacques’ Rampage or When Do We Lose Our Self-confidence?. He finished his master's programme at the same university and made his MA graduation short called Lesser of Two Evils, based on the novels by Attila Hazai.
