Shorts
'I'm Not Nearly Cool Yet', 'Ergot': Sharing The Experience (In Focus: CEE Animation 2025)
Viktor Smolkin
"Laughing through the urge to cry" is the main stylistic choice by Anastazja Naumenko, who explores the queer context of her hometown, Mykolaiv, Ukraine, in her latest short film project, 'I’m Not Nearly Cool Yet' (15 min, 3D), produced by Maks Piłasiewicz in Poland. It features a teenage Slavic Firebird from the 90s, haunted by captors desperate to steal her spark. A private story serves as the foundation for exploring queer archives across Ukraine and reconstructing the past to better understand the present. Anastazja Naumenko won this year's short film category at the 2025 CEE Animation Forum.
A triumph for MOMA master student Damjan Lazin and his producer Zsuzsanna Vincze, who took Hungary to win this year's student film category at the CEE Animation Forum with their short film - 'Ergot' (12 min, Stop-motion/3D).
It is a personal life experience and a deep love for stop-motion that brings to life the story of a wheat mill boss, KJ, whose past is hunting him. Embodied as a wheat demon, it grows bigger and bigger, forcing KJ to retreat until he realizes the scale of the grief that has consumed him. This psychological horror uses the stop-motion technique to immerse the 3D rendered character into the living environment of the wheat mill.
I'm Not Nearly Cool Yet Pitching at the 2025 CEE Animation Forum (photo credit: Petra Sucha)
CEE Animation Forum Experience
Zsuzsanna Vincze, 'Ergot': Presenting the project shows how much the field has opened up for darker, adult-oriented animation. We strongly believe that psychological horror especially benefits from animation’s ability to visualize subjective states and unsettling atmospheres. While it’s still a niche genre, festivals, streamers, and boutique distributors are increasingly looking for bold, auteur-driven works, so there’s real space for projects that push boundaries in style and storytelling.
Maks Piłasiewicz, 'I’m Not Nearly Cool Yet': CEE Animation Forum was a great place to meet potential collaborators and get feedback on what we’ve done so far. That was very helpful, and we really believe it might pay off in the future. For now, we’re still looking for a composer and a sound designer for the film, as well as VFX professionals who can help us with fiery special effects.
The Next Step
Damján Lazin, 'Ergot': For me, as a visual person, it was already hard to translate the images I originally had in my mind to a written form. Now we are nearly at the end of script development, slowly starting to storyboard, and I find myself having trouble translating text into images again. For me, these are very different languages, and it's sometimes hard to go back and forth.
Maks Piłasiewicz and Anastazja Naumenko, 'I’m Not Nearly Cool Yet': We’ve finalized the script and storyboard, and we’re currently in the middle of visual development and animatic production. While the overall style is already set and aligned with my approach in previous films, the development of additional characters and environments is still in progress. We’ve also completed initial tests of adapting motion-capture animation to our characters, and we’re very happy with the results. At this point, we’re finalizing the budget and expect to begin production at the start of 2026.
Ergot, Damjan Lazin -prod. Zsuzsanna Vincze (MOME Anim)
Aesthetics
Damján Lazin, 'Ergot': Stop motion was a very instinctive choice. I have had a great love for it since I was a child. And I also really enjoy set building. On the other hand, I wanted the industrial environment to have a strong sense of presence, so viewers can be immersed in the environment, which plays an important role in my story. Characters will be 3D animated and composited into real-life footage of the background sets. Because this is a horror short, I want my character to have strong facial expressions, and I want to show fear. For this, 3D seems more suited.
Anastazja Naumenko, 'I’m Not Nearly Cool Yet': There’s definitely a stylistic through-line: I’m not strictly replicating the previous visual style, but I’m preserving the core principles and continuing to build one larger visual world. The current project also leans into cringe, uneasiness, and in-your-face honesty – the same glue that held my previous animation short, 'Can You Hear Me', together. 'I’m Not Nearly Cool Yet' relies heavily on observation, humor, and micro-interactions tied to a very specific time and place, making them, hopefully, revealing glimpses into a bigger context that doesn’t necessarily need to be fully understood. I usually use humor as a tool for temporary relief in situations that are otherwise just miserable – laughing through the urge to cry is often my guiding star when I shape the emotional arcs of my films.
'I'M NOT NEARLY COOL YET' dir. Anastazja Naumenko, prod. Maks Piłasiewicz / Blurred
Personal Expression
Damján Lazin, 'Ergot': I think it was in me for a long time. It just needed a format or a platform to surface. When I started thinking about the film, I didn't immediately begin with control. First, I fell in love with the industrial wheat mill where my grandpa worked. And after that, everything slowly fell into place.
Anastazja Naumenko, 'I’m Not Nearly Cool Yet': The project originated from a very personal wish to document the queer history of my hometown, Mykolaiv, since there’s no public archive preserving those memories. I grew up in a tightly heteronormative environment, so the queer community was basically invisible to me. After coming out, I wanted to understand what life looked like for them in the nineties and early 2000s, when I didn’t even know about the existence of the communities.
Because of the war, many people have left the city, and others are afraid to live openly, so gathering these stories has been challenging, and the archive still doesn’t capture the full complexity of the topic. The film is also partly based on the first Ukrainian Lesbian Archive, created by Kateryna Farbar, which documents, with empathy and curiosity, more than 25 years of lesbian history across different regions of Ukraine.
Current law doesn’t recognize same-sex partnerships, making it impossible for partners to make crucial decisions on behalf of each other – even in something as vital as a hospital. This context gives the film its urgency, diving into the origins of homophobia in Ukraine, which are deeply tied to the country’s Soviet colonial past.
Studying + Producing
Zsuzsanna Vincze, 'Ergot': Collaborating on such a project means bridging two different ecosystems, though at MOME this is far from unusual. Our MA program operates much like a real indie studio—developing projects, setting budgets and production plans, and preparing grant applications—while teaching students to collaborate directly with professionals and with their peers. The key challenge is transforming the project’s early, rapidly evolving creative energy into a stable, production-ready framework. At the same time, co-production offers valuable external input, wider networks, and access to stronger technical resources, all while helping preserve and elevate the project’s original creative vision.
Ergot Pitching at the 2025 CEE Animation Forum (photo credit: Petra Sucha)
contributed by: Viktor Smolkin
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