The 20th Brussels Cartoon and Animated Film Festival - Festival du dessin animé et du film d'animation handed out its top European awards. There were prizes only for national films, because the international official selection is non-competitive. Because Brussels is the capital of Belgium, a country with two separate language-based communities, there are, of course, two national Grand Prixs. The prize of the French-speaking community went to Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar for their film PANIQUE À LA CUISINE and the Dutch-speaking Flemish community prize went to Aljosja Roels for the film PLASTICRASH. Both prizes were 100,000 Belgian frangs (US$2,320). The Brussels festival is also one of the partner festivals of Cartoon, the animation platform of the European Union. Cartoon's prestigious annual Cartoon d'Or prize is given to one of the European winners from the partner festivals each year. Because there is no international competition, the Brussels festival names the candidates itself. The films named to compete for the next Cartoon d'Or in September are: CHICKEN KIEV by Thomas Stellmach (Germany), FATHER AND DAUGHTER by Michael Dudok de Wit (Britain), LE PROCESSUS DE XAVIER by l'Hermuzière and Philippe Grammaticopoulos (France), LE PUITS by Jérôme Boulbès (France) and the two regional winners mentioned above. Brussels festival is a long event, lasting this year from February 21 to March 3. The official selection and retrospective screenings take place mostly in the evenings and the afternoon screenings are devoted to the local school kids who flock to the cinema in big groups. Although not competitive, the festival has an official selection for both feature and short animations. Out of the 575 entries for the short film section the festival chose 114. These films came from 20 countries, but are mostly from Belgium, France and the United Kingdom. Eight feature animations were presented during the festival. The most interesting was OPTIMUS MUNDUS, a 60-minute Russian film made to celebrate Moscow's 850th anniversary. It includes 55 short pieces done by an international group of animators. It is a true fireworks display of styles, techniques and stories. The broad variety of retrospectives included Len Lye, Australian animation, Norwegian Inger Lise Hansen, masters of clay animation and animated memories from the past 20 years of the festival. In addition, French studio Folimage was presented in an exhibition. Animation professionals met for three days for Anima, an event held March 1 - 3. The topics included sound and music in animation, animation effects and a round table featuring animators working abroad.
You can check out the work of Folimage in AWN's gallery!
