A film about Palestine by five students from GOBELINS Paris won the Student Competition at Animasyros 2026, where more than 280 films from 50 countries were shown in Ermoupoli, Greece. Noran Fikri Alezabi, Nicholas Arujah, Xinyue Ma, Yulin YUE and Xiaonan Zhou made Gauze.
Films from across borders
Animasyros marked its 19th consecutive year with seven competition sections: International, Student, K.ID.S, AnimaPride, National Competition, TV & Commissioned Films and Feature Films. Its programme also included a focus on Irish animation, educational workshops, parallel events and international collaborations.
Gauze took the Student Competition award. Eyeliner by Aisha Boujilouli won the AnimaPride prize. The section features films with LGBTQI+ content and celebrates creativity, queer expression and acceptance. Anna Mantzaris won the Grand Prize of the International Competition for Please, while Konstantinos Demis won the Greek Competition for The Dog.
Saltwater by Eilidh Nicoll of the United Kingdom won the Television and Commissioned Films category. The K.ID.S category’s first prize went to The Eagle and the Kinglet by Paul Jadoul of the Czech Republic. Martin Lund’s Unstoppable received the Audience Award. The festival described it as a subversive, emotional and humorous adventure film.
Animasyros’s industry market has become a reference point for animation in the Eastern Mediterranean. This year’s programme also marked 200 years of Ermoupoli.
Animation as a way to tell difficult stories
Animasyros opened with the Greek premiere of Decorado by Spanish creator Alberto Vásquez. The Embassy of Spain in Greece and the Cervantes Institute supported the screening. Decorado received the Paul Grimault award at this year’s Annecy animation festival, and the festival described it as an animated version of The Truman Show.
José Luis Ágreda, the film’s creative director, called Decorado “a parable, a dark parable about our society and the way in which each of us, every individual, feels within it.” He said it was also about “how society or, more specifically, companies try to dehumanise people.”
Ágreda described Arnold, the central character, as a man without a job who finds everything strange and detached from his reality. Funny animal characters and humour shape the film, he said, even as the world around them turns into a darker dystopia. “This was our way of getting audiences to think about what is happening around us today,” Ágreda said.
The animation style drew on classic American animation, Ágreda said, but gave it a different twist. “It is as if we have a very happy world, like the society they try to sell us, but inside it there is something rotten,” he said. Unusual colour combinations make that world feel like “a nightmare, not a dream.”
Ágreda also compared Arnold’s experience with social media, where people can feel they’re at the centre of attention while the world around them is constructed. “We live in a society that stays with appearance and not with being,” he said. The film shows people playing roles on a set while failing to see what is happening around them.
Sound, image and collaboration
Montreal-based Canadian sound designer Olivier Calvert led a masterclass on sound as a storytelling tool. His credits include the Oscar-nominated short film The Girl Who Cried Pearls, and he joined the Oscar-winning sound team for Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. The festival paid tribute to his work and screened a selection of films.
Sound design can use environmental sounds such as “birds, traffic noise, the sea, the waves,” Calvert said, or sit beneath music and dialogue to create tension. “Sound is the filter through which you look at the image,” he said. “It gives you the emotion with which you perceive that image.”
Animation lets creators build a world instead of reproducing a natural environment. “In an animated film we do not need the sound to be realistic,” Calvert said. “We can create a completely different world, a unique world.” He described the soundtrack as a collaboration among director, composer and sound designer, with image and sound working together to tell a story.
Animasyros will celebrate its 20th anniversary next year. Vassilis Karamitssanis, President of the Animasyros International Festival, said the festival aims to showcase Greek and European talent around the world and highlight new techniques and technologies in animation.