Jury

Jury

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF FEATURE FILMS

David Silverman

David Silverman took an interest in animation and cartooning at age 9. Making super 8 movies, drawing and tuba playing eventually led him to the UCLA Animation Workshop. After a variety of freelance jobs David became an animator on The Tracey Ullman Show in 1987. There he, along with fellow animators Wes Acher and Bill Kopp, began animating and developing The Simpsons with Matt Groening.
In 1989 The Simpsons was made into a primetime series, and David became a director, and later a supervising director and a producer. Then a call from Steve Jobs brought David to Pixar. He reconnected with his friend Pete Docter and became a co-director on Monsters, Inc. in 1998. He also worked as story editor on Blue Sky’s Ice Age (2002) and as a board artist on Robots (2005). David did boards for Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) before becoming supervising director of The Simpsons once again. He directed three of the Treehouse of Horror Halloween specials before taking on directing The Simpsons Movie (2007). David recently directed the soon-to-be-released animated feature Extinct.

Luce Grosjean

Film producer and distributor Luce Grosjean holds an HND in audiovisual techniques and a degree in production management. In 2014, she founded Séve Films, a distribution company focused on promotion of student films in animation festivals and on young talents. In 2017, she associated with Miyu Productions and together they established Miyu Distribution, specialized in distribution at festivals and international sales. Her distribution catalogue includes, among others, short films Average Happiness (2019) and Daughter (2019).

Pierre Yves Drapeau

Pierre Yves Drapeau is an award-winning composer and sound designer based in Montreal, Canada. His focus is mainly on animated movies, but his work also includes documentaries, live-action movies and multimedia shows. He is the founder of Lobe, a production company dedicated to the development and production of independent animated films and documentaries. His filmography as sound editor and composer includes, among others, the movies Captain Morten and the Spider Queen (2018,
dir. Kaspar Jancis, Riho Unt), Waiting for the New Year (2016, dir. Vladimir Leschiov), Subconscious Password (2013, dir. Chris Landreth) and The Banquet for the Concubine (2012, dir. Hefang Wei).

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF SHORT FILMS AND STUDENT FILMS

Serge Besset

Serge Besset is a French music composer, particularly known for his soundtracks for animated films. Since 1980 he has composed more than 400 original soundtracks. He also writes music for live-action movies, children’s series, shorts and commercials. He has received multiple awards for his work on Phantom Boy (2015, dir. Jean-Loup Felicioli, Alain Gagnol), Aunt Hilda! (2013, dir. Benoît Chieux, Jacques-Rémy Girerd), A Cat in Paris (2010, dir. Jean-Loup Felicioli, Alain Gagnol), The Monk and the Fish (1994, dir. Michael Dudok de Wit), among others. Serge Besset works at Folimage, a famous French animation studio founded in 1981.

Eliška Děcká

Eliška Děcká is an Assistant Professor at the Animation Department of the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts in Prague (FAMU), Czech Republic, where she teaches history and theory of animation. She is a member of the Society for Animation Studies and regularly presents her research at the SAS annual conferences (Singapore, Montreal, Lisbon). She has been collaborating with various animation festivals as a curator (Fantoche, Tricky Women, PAF Olomouc, Fest Anča) and in 2015, she co-founded a non-profit organisation AniScreen with the aim of promoting artistic independent animation by producing various curated site-specific screenings of animated shorts. AniScreen events take place in venues like cafés, hair salons, war bunkers, boats, museums, bike workshops and many more.

Anna Mantzaris

Anna Mantzaris is a Swedish animation director based in London and Stockholm. She works mainly in stop motion. Her work is often character-driven and she loves to mix humour and despair. Her short films have won over 60 awards, including European Animation Awards, Vimeo Best of the Year and the Walt Disney Award. Alongside making her own films, she is represented by Passion Animation Studios, where she directs different types of commercials and commissions, including a Christmas advert for Greenpeace. Anna has an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art and recently worked on Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs (2018).

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF ABSTRACT AND NON-NARRATIVE ANIMATION AND MUSIC VIDEOS, VR FILMS

Michaela Čopíková

Michaela Čopíková studied animation at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava and her graduate film About Socks and Love won the Slovakian Sun in a Net Award for the best animated film in 2010. She later got a Fulbright Scholarship and continued her studies at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. She and Veronika Obertová founded Ové Pictures in 2010 and they have been actively producing animations, music videos, commercials, various artistic designs and organising exhibitions. They use mainly traditional animation techniques – drawing, stop-motion and cutout animation. They have won many awards both in the Czech Republic and abroad. Their most successful works include a short film called Nina (2014), festival jingles for the Slovak Film Week festival (2017, 2018) and animation for the documentary series Female First (2015–2020).

Milen Alempijević

Milen Alempijević is the artistic director of the Animanima international animation festival based in Čačak, Serbia. He is the author of several published books of various genres, and the main works are the collection of essays on animated film The Art of Exaggeration: The Notes of a Spectator (2014) and film study The Day Miles Evans Disappeared: Jazz and Film Narration (2016). Editor of the “Jazz” double-volume thematic issue of the distinguished Serbian art and culture periodical Gradac. He is the editor of the special 2016 DVD edition Beyond 2000: Contemporary Serbian Animation. Milen works for the Cultural Centre in Čačak as the managing editor of the film and video programme.

Joost Rekveld

Joost Rekveld is a Dutch artist, curator and experimental filmmaker. As an artist he is motivated by the question of what we can learn from a dialogue with machines. His abstract films have been shown worldwide at a wide range of festivals and venues for experimental film, animation or other kinds of moving image. He has had retrospectives at the Barbican in London and the Ann Arbor film festival amongst others, and in 2017 he was filmmaker in focus at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Since February 2017, Joost has been affiliated to the School of Arts, University College Ghent as an artistic researcher. He has also realised several installations and is involved in many collaborative projects.

International Competition of Independent Computer Games

Lukáš Medek

Lukáš Medek has been active in the gaming industry for 14 years primarily as a 3D graphic and game designer. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology and since 2006, he has been a part of the creative duo CBE Software along with Jan Kavan. He has published more than eight games and he is currently finishing a psychological horror set in Czech woods called Someday You’ll Return. Among other things, he creates videos and animations for theatre and multimedia performances, lectures on graphics and game design and mentors young developers.

Rafael Varona

Rafael Varona is an illustrator and animator originally from the Netherlands and living in Berlin. He studied Graphic Design at the University of Arts in Berlin and started his own studio in 2012, which is based in Berlin and Rotterdam. His work focuses on complex animated loops for clients like Pepsi, Google, Intel and many more. He started to develop a rhythm game together with Honig Studios Berlin based on his series Impossible Bottles.

Marek Plichta

Marek Plichta is based in Berlin and has been working on art, animation and design for playful media professionally since 2009. He was a game designer and the sole visual artist for indie games Future Unfolding, Spirits and Ordnungswissenschaft. He also taught courses in game design and interactive comics at the design departments of the Universities in Potsdam and Hamburg, Germany. Marek graduated in Interaction Design and enjoys tinkering with (new) technologies to develop novel aesthetics and emotional experiences. He is currently developing an interactive comic based around
concepts of Mindfulness.