The Story Returns – The Irony Triumphs – The Woman Sees

Animafest Zagreb 2026 Grand Competition Short Film

Djevojka s bisernim suzama / The Girl Who Cried Pearls

Classically told tales, sardonic views on social and psychological misfortunes of contemporary life and original female points of view are among the distinctive traits of this year’s Grand Competition Short Film – the most prestigious competition segment of Animafest Zagreb, for which Aleta Rajič, Niko Radas and Daniel Šuljić selected 37 out of 1000 submitted entries. Luckily, this is only a small portion of Animafest 2026’s entire line-up, consisting of over 300 works from 47 countries. In competition for the Grand Prix, with some of the films shown to the world for the very first time, some screened for the first time outside their home country, and some completing the impressive festival streak that began in Cannes, Venice, Berlin, Annecy or Ottawa, Croatian cinema will be represented by School Show by Ana Horvat (Umjetnička organizacija Anima) and Strive by Krešimir Pernek (Zagreb film). The array of filmmakers seeking their Oscar qualification through this year’s Grand Competition are Animafest’s former winners Yumi Joung, Georges Schwizgebel, Sasha Svirsky and Joe Hsieh, as well as other festival icons who are already a household names among Animafest’s audience.

The colourful company is led by the Oscar-winning Canadian puppet film The Girl Who Cried Pearls by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski – the painstakingly designed, magical story accompanied by the voice of Colm Feore and anchored in a historical time, speaking about poverty, greed and hard choices. An impressive portrayal of shabby, poor outdoor spaces of Montreal and detailed turn-of-the-century interiors is achieved equally by outstanding light and set design made of found materials (such as drenched cardboard or road cleaning brushes). With inspirations ranging from Dickens, Andersen and Frankenstein, to Persian and Indian fairy tales and sacral sculpture (puppet design), to Man Ray and the Quay brothers, The Girl Who Cried Pearls is also a subtly feminist film and an allegory of the power of storytelling.

Promising Young Woman

The meditative biography of a Vietnamese shellfish gatherer, Water Girl portrays a coastal life from youthful love to deep old age with a delicate, impressionistic colour scheme and consciously slowed down movement. Awarded the French national César award and screened in Cannes, Sandra Desmazières’s film is a tribute to the author’s origins and a comprehensive work of female experience: in community, landscape, family and solitude. Visual artist Ana Horvat also presents a personal story set in the era of late socialism in School Show, but with a dark subtext of a child’s first encounter with human depravity. Crafted in the aesthetics of a child’s drawing and point of view, suitable to a girl’s memories of pioneer days, School Show thus underlines the poignancy of its theme with style. In the cabaret milieu of interwar Germany, we find, on the other hand, a gymnast without legs – a cleaning lady who gets the opportunity to cover the whole city with an ‘exotic’ performance. Both the avant-garde spatiality and the socio-critical subject matter of Christoph Büttner’s Carla and Her Legs are based on the Weimar context of the plot and the author’s inclusive ethos, while the old-fashioned black-and-white cartoon aesthetic achieved by a combination of 2D and 3D reflects the aspiration towards an analogue style achieved by digital means. On the other hand, the Brazilian film How a River Is Born (dir. Luma Flôres) is one of those classically beautiful, colour-intense animated movies that festival audiences love to watch. It is a work that allusively and poetically connects the hills and valleys of the female body with elements of the environment, and explores identity and sexual maturation, as well as the acceptance of queer identity. A miniature adaptation of the eponymous book (or rather, its first pages) by the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt A Man’s Heart (dir. Chloë Danguy) is a humorous and ultimately fantastic look at annoying men who do not allow a girl on a train to read in peace.

Korean Yumi Joung, with her distinctive black-and-white drawing style created Glasses, previously screened in Cannes – a defamiliarized, paradoxical ophthalmological drama of seeing oneself, which, compared to the author’s earlier poetics, also surprises with a strong departure from scenographic minimalism. Traditional and 2D drawing, animation of puppets and objects were, on the other hand, necessary for the story of a woman considering an adventure with a bad boy and the consequent separation: screened at Sundance, Ivar (dir. Markus Tangre) is initially a film about strong repulsion, here presented through ironic grotesque, and then about the emotional sinusoids of long-term relationships.

The Spanish film Pinchu Is Like That (dir. Carmen Córdoba González) also belongs to the field of caricature – a work on the serious topic of the protagonist’s unpleasant experience with a pervert humoured by the social circle, but which is also not devoid of irony in the form of a canine counterpart and grotesque transformations. A painterly, poetic psychological study of the body and the associated identity, based on fluid transformations, a strong impression of carnality, colour and fragments of personal memories, Once in a Body by María Cristina Pérez González is an elegy about a full-figured girl, her family and doubts. The film, which happily culminates in self-acceptance, was shown at Sundance, Locarno and Toronto. In Tourists, Mária Kralovič accompanied the adventures and misadventures of another full-figured, lustful amateur scout for whom nature originally presents a threatening challenge, only to then surrender to it in a characteristic ‘return to the origin’. Her domineering, clumsy husband provides the film with a metaphorical reading potential against the backdrop of the awakening of passion in a stale relationship, but also of addiction / independence from a toxic relationship.

Kiril Khachaturov brings Like a Fairy Tale, a plot about a young woman’s anything but fairy tale return to her hometown, where she nevertheless finds solace in content-heavy and telling, but emotionally expressionless interactions with her peers and mother, which are also a clear comment on contemporary Russia. The director previously presented his specific 3D style of imperfect 3D models of elongated limbs and wide hips, interwoven with references (here to Millais’s Ophelia) at Animafest with the film Naked, winning the student competition in 2020.

Foreign Body

In his new film Praying Mantis, Taiwanese director Joe Hsieh remains faithful to the horror genre patterns that made him famous. Although it is a 2D film, and not a cutout like Animafest winner Night Bus, Hsieh’s style once again emphatically distinguishes the characters and their slightly stiff movements from the lush backgrounds in a way that suggests precisely this traditional technique. The story of the film, previously shown in Venice, follows a monstrous woman-mantis in search of human flesh to feed a child living in the pool of an abandoned clinic. Through the story of the origin and end of this bloody situation, Praying Mantis provides reflections on the themes of parenthood, self-sacrifice and the objectification of the female body, but it can also be ‘consumed’ as a pure genre flick. And in the genre richness of this year’s Grand Competition, the intense rhythm and sound of Krešimir Pernek’s Strive, set in a retro-futuristic dystopia, stands out. With parallel, narratively scattered stories about pig-headed people with glowing eyes, it comments on plagues such as consumerism, addiction and the imperative of entertainment (which we often look at with ‘tunnel vision’), as well as the drives of desire, fear and violence, i.e. confrontations with personal demons. Dominated at first by three basic colours (blue, yellow and red, which gradually play out to the full palette of the finale), Strive relies on the striking design of characters and backgrounds – world-building in the manner of the greatest masters of comic and animated SF.

Like Joachim Hérissé’s previous film Skinned (Animafest 2022), The Flesh Dress is an extremely visceral puppet film whose approach to design is in line with the plot. The patched puppets fit with the story of an old tailor who refuses to accept new trends, his own aging and his wife’s death. Although the plot fits comfortably into the field of Gothic horror, the film about the pathological fear of the departure of loved ones, loss of relevance and loneliness stands out above all for its poignancy. The puppet-making technique, the setting (a swampy hut by the ‘river of life’), and the fantastic treatment of time are also in continuity with the author’s previous work, while the main character’s obsession might remind some of Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Perhaps the most colourful horror film ever made outside of Japan, God Is Shy, with which debut director Jocelyn Charles (previously known for videos for The Weeknd) attracted attention at the Cannes Film Festival, brings to life the fears that two young people draw on a train journey. When mesmerism and the related eschatological issues also appear in the story, we become certain that this full-blooded fantastic animated novella, with unspoken Poe-Lovecraftian (the author, in fact, only mentions Ari Aster and Jordan Peele) and anime inspirations, is an event not to be missed. With mixed techniques of drawing, digital cutout and computer 2D animation that allow him to create an original, almost silhouette-like and spatially melting style, Alex Boya makes another horror, but in the subgenre of zombie apocalypse and satirical premonition – Bread Will Walk. Screened in Cannes and Annecy, the film outlines the heroine’s efforts to save her brother who has been turned into a zombie by consuming GMO bread. And although it is not a horror film, Bulgarians Vladislav Ivanov and Ivaylo Zahariev, with their adaptation of Bulgakov in the mostly monochromatic work Loneliness, Snow and Pines, also touched on the ‘foreign body’: the one that will make the lovers’ already dramatic telephone conversation even more suspenseful.

Reality bites

In the documentary puppet film Winter in March, Armenian Natalia Mirzoyan tells the story of a young couple’s escape from Russia after the beginning of War in Ukraine. The employment of stitches and thread as letters and drawings, fabrics as a background for occasional two-dimensional illustrations, and the symbolic use of other materials and objects set Winter in March apart from the usual manners of puppet films – although they are also superbly executed (like the treatment of cotton wool as snow or smoke). In the tradition of engaged animated documentary that helps to convey otherwise unpresentable political or psychological aspects of the past and present, Winter in March thus immediately ranks among modern hybrid classics such as The Missing Picture, Crulic, or 1970. Partly a discussion of the psychological implications of computer code (quite in keeping with the contemporary moment of artificial intelligence), and partly a personal story about a relationship with a virtual dog, Should Virtual Petz Die? (dir. Carlo Galbiati) is an experimental documentary that, with the help of the now somewhat forgotten machinima technique and archival inserts, looks back at the work of the company PF.Magic, whose programs like Dogz and Catz created a loyal following of users strongly connected to virtual pets back in the 1990s.

Zachary (Zak) Margolis’s visually impressive ecological parable How to Walk follows a magnetic monstrous entity that integrates waste and other materials into itself on its journey through the forest, the city, and the sea. The computer-generated 3D film by an American author with a background in music videos (e.g. for Unwound) visually evokes the best stop-motion animation, with the digital capabilities of the ‘liberated’ camera allowing How to Walk to also be understood as an ironic commentary on personal growth and development.

Sylwia Szkiladz’s Autokar is a story of revived imagination and memories from the perspective of an eight-year-old Polish girl who travels by bus to Belgium in the 1990s. The author manages to weave a cross-section of Polish society in permanent migration (family separation) into the fairy-tale-like perspective of a child (the passengers are anthropomorphic animals), and to highlight the ineradicability of memories and stories. From a little-known Maltesian animation cinema comes Misophonia (dir. Michelle Gruppetta), a rhizographic film about the namesake neurobehavioral disorder (intolerance to certain sounds such as sniffing, coughing, slapping, drilling, etc.) that also speaks to the general penetration of sound pollution into private space. The first-time director was inspired by her move from Malta to Denmark, which helped her become more aware of the noise of her densely populated homeland.

An interesting separate topos of this year’s Grand Competition are three films about coexistence in apartment buildings. Using the bright colours of classical painting on paper, which allows her to dynamically and creatively transform frames and characters, the Finnish filmmaker Jenny Jokela meanders through apartments and floors in Dollhouse Elephant, following their smells, sounds and views. The award-winning sound of the film and its otherwise impressive festival run is marked by choral music that further underlines the maddening, forced communal experience of urban living, but which is also capable of making people laugh and ultimately calm down in accepting man’s social nature. The unusual frontal framing of coexistence, personality and secrets is also intoned in the primarily humorous tone of Facade (dir. Elise Kruusel), whose disintegration can be understood as a metaphor for social masks that hide insecurity, shame, desire or malice, but which inevitably fall off at some point. In addition, Facade is a true paradise for cat lovers. Iva Tokmakchieva’s Balconada, a blue-pink-white film with a classically beautiful, reduced cartoon aesthetic and initially neorealistic, and then symbolist narrative, depicts a summer morning in an apartment complex through a multitude of details, views, angles and plans. The arrival of the storm then leads us into new forms of musical, motific and emotional intertwining.

The French live action rotoscopic drama 2:14 PM (dir. Luciano Lepinay) is a film about the profound consequences of the omnipresence of the camera and Tik Tok in the everyday life and worldview of young people. It reveals emotional deprivation, bullying and compensatory voyeurism, as well as the discrepancy between virtual and real identities, all in an unfortunate combination with the universal teenage problems of a strong sexual drive and susceptibility to opiates. What sets the film apart from the usual subject matter, however, is not only its occasional dreamlike scenes, but its context – it is an adaptation of the namesake theatre play by David Paquet. The thematic complex of adolescence also includes Frank Ternier’s Strange Teen Spirit, in which, caught between longing and fear in a fragmented world at sunset, young Anton, with his faithful depressive shadow, is condemned to observe activist graffiti artists. It is a film in which rotoscoping performed in a distinct ‘felt-point’ style and often surrealist set design provide a special aesthetic, consistent with the consciousness and position of a young person in a pre-apocalyptic moment, caused as much by an ecological catastrophe as by the sins of the ancestors.

The Man Who Laughs

Leo Černic’s playfully caricatured Cosmonauts treats space travel as a fetishist, orgiastic grotesque full of phalluses, breasts and buttocks, but despite such Plympton-esque appearance, explicitness and ironic, humorous intonation, it is actually a film about loneliness (lack of love), empty physicality and the plague of mass tourism. Cosmonauts will, however, entertain with its irresistible intensity even those viewers who themselves are solely in search of (audiovisual) excitement. The gentle and witty Dutch-Belgian work Murmuration by Janneke Swinkels and Tim Frijsinger is set in a retirement home. Although the hero’s transformation into a bird is an unambiguous allegory for the failure of the body and death (which is also contributed to by the design of the puppets made of spongy material), the atmosphere and gentleness of the film make even such a theme easy to watch. Another humorous puppet film, Please by Anna Mantzaris, uses a slice-of-lif narrative approach to address the usual targets of contemporary alienation (corporate and romantic meetings, Tik Tok, mobile phones, supermarkets), but then expresses itself with a sympathetic inclination towards the vast landscapes of loneliness. The characteristically Northern European film, namely, observes chronic inner desolation against the background of an indifferent environment with a formal distance, only to arrive at a collective dance-like rejection of the scourge of modern life through a more or less cringe-worthy embrace.

The paradoxical Irish comedy A Pint of Bitter (dir. Conor Kehelly) contains, in its fisheye view, a witty depiction of alcoholic ‘logic’ that suddenly explodes into an unusual odyssey with the potential for deeper introspection. The Chinese film A Taste of Beer (dir. Xie Li) is also humorous in its own way, a surprisingly minimalist dialogue between a serpentine father and a football player son that reflects issues of public status and family relationships, coming-of-age and giving up on life.

Cruel beauty

The legendary Swiss Georges Schwizgebel, winner of the Animafest Lifetime Achievement Award, in The Picture of Dorian Gray moves and merges scenes from Wilde’s template with the help of his recognisable acrylics and classical music accents. A considerable novelty is the opening and closing of the film, executed as multiple screens, i.e. visual polyphony. Last year’s Animafest winner Sasha Svirsky returns with the international premiere of Unidentified Non-Flying Objects (UNO) (national premiere was at the Berlinale) – a film in which the fixation on sorting and absurdist treatment of objects and their (un)usability modelled on the avant-garde poetics of ‘Isms’ actually speaks of the dysfunctionality of a closed order and its loss of monopoly on knowledge. Compared to the author’s previous experimental-philosophical, engaged computer 3D films, the aesthetics here is more graphic, although occasional video inserts are also retained.

Using classic cell, 2D digital animation and rotoscoping, Tinnitus #3 presents introspective, iconographically associative or illogical (but not abstract) reflections on unpleasant thoughts in dominant black and white shades. Italian veteran Michele Bernardi created the film as a visual poetry of timeless art that, in accordance with the title, also relies heavily on experimental sound and music. This difficult to convey, but striking film will be one of the prominent cinematic experiences of this year’s Grand Competition. The same can be said for Colombian-French auteur Nieto, who, after his spectacular work Swallow the Universe (Animafest, 2022) based on the work of Japanese artist Daichi Mori, earned a new appearance in the Grand Competition with the film Um – a no less impressive, weird and intense avian theogony that once again relies on the same artist’s patchwork, anthropomorphic creatures and the emaki (horizontal scroll) technique, but also an apocalyptic-dystopian overtone, exploding feathered entrails and – eggs.