15/10/2008

German director Hayo Freitag’s smart 2D fantasy feature The Three Robbers [+see also:
trailer
film profile] won the Best Feature Award at the third edition at the Anim’est International Animation Film Festival, which ran from October 3-12 in Bucharest. The Saturday night gala also saw Spanish director Santiago Grasso walk away with the Anim’est trophy for his short film The Employment.

The fiction film jury – Argentinean director Juan Pablo Zaramella, French film critic Francis Gavelle and Romanian director Matei Branea – had a hard time choosing the best of the five titles in the competition, which also featured 2008 Crystal Bear winner Sita Sings the Blues by Nina Paley and Goya Award nominee De profundis [+see also:
trailer
film profile] by Miguelanxo Prado.

The third Anim’est has seen the festival continue to grow in terms of audience and size, increasing to over 9,000 admissions, almost double compared to last year’s festival (5,000) and three times more than the 2006 edition.

Two-time Academy Award nominee Bill Plympton was the special guest at this year’s Anim’est and the screening of his latest feature, Idiots & Angels, left no sitting or standing room in the Scala theatre. Plympton also held a masterclass, following John Dillworth’s showy presentation focused on the way animation sets the subconscious free.

Besides the feature film competition, there were also other awards and mentions, including the traditional Audience Award (won by famed Israeli director Gil Alkabetz for his short A Sunny Day) and the Excellency Award, presented to Romanian veteran Ion Truica, a Palme d’Or nominee in 1976.