Ars Independent Festival 2025

Festival Description

The festival is searching for what’s cool in young, debuting, contemporary audio-visual culture. It’s not afraid to watch videos with 27 views on YouTube, it’s missing the “least popular” sorting option on itch.io and considers Festival Scope Pro decidedly “too mainstream”.

2025 Call for Entries

• The Black Horse of Animation Competition within the Festival will take place on December, 2025 in Katowice, Poland.
• Only debuts and second animated films, alongside school films (made before debuts) produced after January 1st, 2024, are eligible to enter the Competition. Entries from authors from all around the world are accepted.
• Films eligible to enter the Competition may be created in any animation technique and their running time must not exceed 30 minutes (including credits).

• Submission via FilmFreeway
• Deadline: 30 June 2025

2022 Festival Coverage

• Programme Highlights

2020 Festival Coverage

The Ars Independent Festival 2020 will already be the 10th edition of the multimedia festival of film, animation, video clip and video games.

Uncertainty as to the possibility of holding a festival in Katowice also prompted the organizers of Ars Independent to decide to be held online only. Unfortunately, most of the festival events planned (and already covered) for this year were not suitable for this new format. As a result, this year’s program had to be invented from scratch a few months before the event.

This year, the organizers are preparing many, often surprising, changes in the formula and scale of Ars Independent. The Black Horse competitions of films, animations, music videos, and video games? We won’t see them this time! The festival will also last shorter, only 3 days – from 24 to 26 September – and will have an experimental character.

2019 Coverage:

• Animation Awardees 2019

2018 Festival Coverage

• Animation Awardees 2018
• Full Programme
• 2018 Selection Results 1
• 2018 Selection Results 2