Jury

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF FEATURE FILMS

Elie Chapuis

Director and animator Elie Chapuis comes from the Swiss city of Lausanne, but he studied animation in France at the prestigious EMCA (École des Métiers du Cinéma d'animation, Angoulême). As an animator, focusing on puppet animation, he took part in a number of successful international projects. Among other films, he worked on Wes Anderson’s The Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) and his most recent film Isle of Dogs. He also collaborated with Claude Barras on his short films and his successful feature film My Life as a Zucchini (2016). He also worked on the films Max & Co. (2007, dir. the Guillaume brothers) and O apóstolo (2012, dir. Fernando Cortizo). Elie’s directorial debut was the short puppet film Impostor (2013)and he was the main animator of Nicolas Liguori’s television special The Wind in the Reeds (2017).

Robin Cooper

Robin Cooper has worked as an Artist and Designer for many years. Most notably as an Art Director and Painter at Pixar Animation studios. She helped to design textures for Finding Nemo and Wall-E as well as several renowned short films.
She graduated from San Francisco State University with a B.A. in Set Design for Theatre and in World Comparative Literature. She worked for many years doing Set Design, Scenic, Mural and Faux painting. Before this she painted textures and characters and sets from Toy Story 1 through Cars 2. She has also worked on ride design with Walt Disney Theme Parks, as well as mural and mosaic design with Disney Cruise Lines and Disney World. She is currently semi-retired, doing the occasional scenic projects and spends most of her time painting for pleasure, riding, teaching art and travelling.

Ben Adler

Ben Adler studied filmmaking in New York, Prague and Paris. Since 2012, Ben has worked on the projects of director Wes Anderson, including The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and 2018’s Isle of Dogs.
Ben’s past two short films have both been shown at festivals and on French television. Pact, in 2014, explored the last moments of a young girl’s life, broadcast online, to uncaring viewers. Coach, Ben’s most recent short, travelled the festival circuit in 2015-16, and was awarded the International Jury Prize at the Berlin Film Festival Generation Section as well as the Jury Prize at Brest European Short Film Festival.

 

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF SHORT FILMS AND STUDENT FILMS

Brigitta Iványi-Bitter

Creative producer, art curator and freelance researcher Brigitta Iványi-Bitter completed her PhD at Eotvos Lorand University, Budapest, Hungary in 2012. As a historian, she specializes in animation history and experimental films in Central-Eastern Europe of the Cold War era, with special focus on the Hungarian Pannonia Film Studio and György Kovásznai’s body of work.
In 2011, she curated William Kentridge’s video installation I am not me, the horse is not mine for the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest. Her productions include Eva Magyarosi’s short docu film Invisible drawings (2012), the experimental TV series Candide (2016), Ungvár (2016) and the animated docu interview Reportrait 2016 for the London show “Kovásznai”. In 2016, Brigitta published a György Kovásznai monograph. She is a lecturer at MOME's animation department.

Chris Landreth

An American animator originally trained as a mechanical engineer. Later he got interested in animation and joined Alias Inc. (now Autodesk), where he created two CG-animated short films, The End (1995) and Bingo (1998). Both films explored storytelling based on human psychology as much as photorealistic character animation, an approach he calls “psychorealistic.”
Chris Landreth continued in in the same vein with his animated documentary Ryan (2004), which earned him international acclaim and numerous awards including an Academy Award in 2005, and in The Spine (2009). His latest film Subconscious Password was awarded the Cristal for Best Short Film in Annecy.
Chris is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2011) for his body of animated film work, and is currently a Distinguished Artist in Residence with the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto. He is a co-founder of JALI Inc., a company dedicated to deep learning-based character animation.

Libor Pixa

Libor Pixa is a Czech director and animator based in Prague. He graduated in animation from the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague under Břetislav Pojar and attracted attention with his graduation film Graffitiger, which won the Magnesia Award of the Czech Lion Awards in 2011 and was selected by the American Film Academy to compete for student Oscars. It is a poetic and humorous film about an animated tiger that moves in the real world. Apart from drawing, Libor Pixa also uses 3D animation with which he made his previous films such as PsiCHO (2005) and Dreadful Accidents (2007). He also contributed his film Vincent to the anthology film Car Fairy Tales (2011). He is currently working on Czech Television’s children’s 3D twenty-episode series The Smallest Elephant in the World.

INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION OF ABSTRACT AND NON-NARRATIVE ANIMATION AND MUSIC VIDEOS

Boris Labbé

Boris Labbé is a graphic and video artist and director who works mainly with animation and installation. After he graduated from EMCA of Angoulęme (École des métiers du cinéma d’animation), his project Kyrielle was awarded the Special Jury’s prize for Graduation Films at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2012. Simultaneously, he developed his work as an artist and film director, and spent one year as artist member at the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. He has collaborated with Sacrebleu Productions to direct two short films, Rhizome (2015) and La Chute (2018). In 2016, Rhizome won the Golden Nica award at Ars Electronica in Computer Animation/Film/VFX. His works have been exhibited in galleries (Canada, Japan and Russia) and selected for festivals internationally. Labbé lives and works in France and Spain. 

Faiyaz Jafri

Faiyaz Jafri is a new media artist of Dutch and Pakistani descent, born and raised in rural Holland. He studied at the Technical University of Delft (MS) and is self-taught as an animation artist and music composer. His prints, paintings, video installations, animations and life-size sculptures can be seen all over the world. Jafri’s art explores Jungian archetypes in the modern world, distilling the pop references of mass media and global popular culture into a visual shorthand of neo-archetypes and his award-winning films (e.g. Hello Bambi, 2011; Planet Utero, 2012; This Ain’t Disneyland, 2015; Sway, 2016) have screened at prestigious festivals and museums. He has also worked for commercial clients including, IBM, Coca-Cola, and Ford. He is the founder and curator of the Third Culture Film Festival in Hong Kong and a part-time professor at Parsons School of Design and Queens College in New York.

Kamila Boháčková

Kamila Boháčková is an editor and film critic who specializes in Czech animation and puppet films. She studied at the Film and TV School of Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague. For many years, she worked as a film critic and editor for different Czech magazines like Cinepur, A2 and Literární noviny. As the editor, she prepared two monographies: V oku velryby (In the Eye of the Whale) dedicated to the Hungarian film director Béla Tarr and Světla v soumraku (Lights in the Dusk) about the Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki. Recently, she was the special editor of the Czech translation of Animasophy by Ülo Pikkov and the editor-in-chief of Homo Felix – The International Journal of Animated Film, a print magazine focused mainly on Visegrad animation. She is a member of RAF – the Czech Board of Animated Film and a member of the Society for Animation Studies.

International Competition of Independent Computer Games

Luke Whittaker

Luke Whittaker is Co-Founder and Creative Director of the BAFTA-winning indie games company State of Play, based in London. He has a background in animation, illustration and games design and was named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit in 2015.
Luke was the director, animator and games designer on the winning Lumino City project and also contributed to the music and sound design. His previous game Kami was an Apple Editor's Choice 2013.

Ricky Haggett

British game designer and illustrator Ricky Haggett is a founder and creative director of London-based independent games studio Hollow Ponds. Prior to that he founded indie games developer Honeyslug. His past games include Hohokum, Loot Rascals, Frobisher Says and Tenya Wanya Teens. He is also a founder of play-in-public collective Wild Rumpus.

Vojtěch Vaněk

An independent game developer experimenting with contemporary illustration, animation and creative writing and paper. In the equation of open narrative, Vojtěch considers the atmosphere as the main denominator, whether it is based on a physical or digital basis. Vojtěch is currently the soul of the Paperash studio (Dark Train X) and the head of the Multimedia and Game Development Studio at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Brno University of Technology.