The best new animated films from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in the running for the ;DSAF (Slovene Animated Film Association) Audience Award and the Jury Grand Prix. The filmmakers featured in this strand include animation legends and debut filmmakers alike, and everyone in between.

A competition strand reserved for students at European universities. They are in the running for the Young Talent Award, presented jointly by the School of Arts (University of Nova Gorica) and Academy of Fine Arts and Design (University of Ljubljana).

Animated shorts in the running for the Children Jury Award for best film in the Elephant programme. Varying by subject matter and technique, this is a selection of animations that will enthral children and their parents alike. As the programmes are carefully tailored to specific age groups, there is no worry in letting the youngest children enjoy the animated images on the big screen.

A programme of the best animated shorts from around the world, programmed to give you a thorough insight into the latest developments and trends in auteur animation, including many award-winners from some of the leading international festivals.

Panorama is a strand that gives you the best insight into what regional animation cinema has to offer.

Students are the future of animation. They are also the most innovative, daring filmmakers, not afraid to experiment with techniques and topics. The strand explores the creative diversity of European animation students.

Animated documentaries are a genre that has been growing in popularity for years now, with filmmakers and spectators alike. For filmmakers, this is a chance to show or conceal things that are easier to show or conceal than in a conventional documentary. For spectators, it is a chance to delve into intriguing stories that no conventional documentary can convey. A win-win genre.

The focus of this festival edition shifts to outstanding works from the history of French animation. In addition to programmes from CNC and Annecy archives, the line-up includes a feature-length classic, a programme of contemporary shorts, a programme for adults, and two programmes for children and families.

North is everywhere solitary. Here is all North. This is a record of the people I met in these Norths. However, my memory is fragmented and does not get the point at all. Now I’m starting to wonder my efforts came to nothing. I’m just getting the occasional recognition of the existence of the world through the dull pain that changes shape little by little.

From an early age, songs and fairy tales convinced Zelma that love would solve all her problems as long as she abided by societal expectations of how a girl should act. But as she grew older something didn’t seem right with the concept of love: the more she tried to conform, the more her body resisted. A story about the acceptance of the inner female rebellion.
Signe’s new animated feature fuses animation with music, theatre, science, photography, three-dimensional sets and traditional hand-drawn animation to tell the story of a spirited young woman’s quest for perfect love and lasting marriage.

Angola. Three generations of women in a 25-year-long civil war: Lelena, the grandmother, her daughter Nayola and her granddaughter Yara.
Past and present interlace. Nayola goes in search of her missing husband at the height of the war. Years later, the country is finally at peace but Nayola has not returned. Yara has become a rebellious teenager and a subversive rap singer. Lelena tries to contain her for fear of the police coming to arrest her. One night, a masked intruder breaks into their house, armed with a machete. An encounter like nothing they could have imagined.

Discover a musical reinterpretation of the Robinson Crusoe myth: The Little Prince meets Monty Python.
Robinson is a doctor and his solitude is voluntary on an island invaded by migrants, NGOs and guards. He saves Friday, a castaway, the only survivor of an illegal refugee boat.
During his days on the island, Robinson encounters extraordinary beings and witnesses extraordinary events. Through visual poetry and symbolism, the film speaks of current affairs in a world where everyone seeks their piece of paradise.

On the audio track Lei Jiaqi starts to recall the 1950s. He is then 4 years old and his father Lei Ting is sent to the countryside. Jiaqi stays behind with his sisters and his ill mother. When mum passes away and turns into a Silver Bird, Ting is forbidden to stay in the town with his children. The kids are sent to an orphanage, where they turn into birds in a cage. While the country is in turmoil, a Rainbow Fish transforms itself into a woman and decides to help the kids.
Caught between semi-gods and mass madness, in a world of propaganda images, surrealist collage and pop-art animation, Lei’s family struggle to live through China’s tumultuous times of the 1950s and 1960s. Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish is an ode to family, memory, reconstruction of family history in the history of China.

A teddy bear army indoctrinates young recruits to wage war against the unicorns who threaten the bears’ survival. The brothers Bluey and Tubby, along with a group of inexperienced recruits, are sent on a dangerous mission to save the magical forest. Are they up to the challenge?
Half Apocalypse Now, half Bambi, Unicorn Wars tells the story of the ancestral war between the army of teddy bears and the unicorns in an antiwar, environmentalist fable.

The film is set on a distant planet called Ygam, where enslaved humans, Oms, are the playthings of giant blue native inhabitants, Draags. After Terr, kept as a pet since infancy, escapes from his gigantic child captor, he is swept up by a band of radical fellow Oms who are resisting the Draags’ oppression and violence. With its eerie, coolly surreal cutout animation by Roland Topor; brilliant psychedelic jazz score by Alain Goraguer; and wondrous creatures and landscapes, this Cannes-awarded 1973 counterculture classic is a perennially compelling statement against conformity and violence.