After five days of an intense program with the best of the animation around the world screened in different cities in the northern of Italy, the Piccolo Festival di Animazione had the closing ceremony yesterday at the Cinema Centrale in the city of Udine*. 

Find the festival highlights

Grand Prix: Winter in the rain forest by Anu-Laura Tuttelberg

Jury statement: The puppets look fake, rigid made of porcelain; forest life has been tempered with the anti naturalistic, accelerated shooting. Water is excessively impetuous and the flowers are too beautiful, too vivid, so it seems they transfer life even to a little doll so perfect that she looks improbable. An yet, all these artificialities typical of the trivialization of the cinematographic technique, instead of being annoying, manage to amalgamate themselves. In doing so they create a world overly reconstructed which takes on the dimension of a dream, evoking it at the same time in a fantastic and poetic way, with those insects, with that shining, rigid and soft at the same time, body of a little porcelain fairy.

Jury Special Mention: Life24 by Kristjan Holm

Statement: Essential, fast, crazy. It is not cleat whether is more anarchic or more surreal, with all those commonplaces it deals with, somehow it seems it solves it but it disperses instead. Despite an obvious identity crisis (the dual negatively multiplied) to be resolved by doping rather than taking drugs. It allows itself  references to denied a narrative by presupposition which is at the same time sough and amalgamated by the grotesquely playful rhythm of the brass band. 

Animakids Winner: Athleticus by Nicolas Deveaux.

Animayoung Winner: Heatwave by Fokion Xenos

• Read Also: Our interview with Fokion Xenos

Audience Award  The Physics of Sorrow by Theodore Ushev

• Read Also: Our film review of The Physics of Sorrow

Visual&Music “Toffolo” Award: Orpheus by Priit Tender

On 19th at 20:30 in the Cinema Teatro Miela in Trieste** will be the last event in the program of PFA, La festa del paradiso, an event to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci. Music, animation on live and dance will create a unique experience. 

Piccolo Animation Festival 2019, Award Ceremony

*City were was born the famous photographer and Frida Kahlo's lover, Tina Modotti.
**The city that was the house for several years of James Joyce the titan of the writers, there he wrote Dubliners and got inspiration for their future works, such as Finnegans Wake and Ulyses.

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