8th Blue Danube Film Festival

Based on real interviews with a couple escaping their repressive home country, Winter in March conveys a sense of helplessness through a hand-crafted textile stop-motion world. The voice editing is carefully paced, allowing the emotional weight of the voices to resonate throughout. Physical threads and stitches are thoughtfully employed to visualize the characters’ emotions, weaving their inner fragility into the material fabric of the film. This handmade animation technique demands lots of time and patience, reflecting the film team's deep contemplation and reflection on the subject throughout the entire creative journey.(Alisi Telengut - Jury)

This animation is adorable, not only the art style, but the story itseff aswell. The unexpected twists give a weird and unique humour to it, but the narration is also quite funny. It's not only bright, but the darker scenes make it strong and beautiful. In one sentence, it has everything you need: it's cute,funny and thought-provoking. Everyone can watch it, because it can be really educational for any age group. (Evelyn Nagy - Student Jury)

The film is both serious and ironic, it makes you think about identity and at the same time makes fun of the importance surrounding the identity problem. The director also uses the found footage technique, which is extremely popular these days and is therefore already somewhat empty, in an extremely original and witty way. "John Smith" bravely stands up for the "John Smiths", ordinary average people - in a work that is not ordinary at all. (Gábor Gelencsér - Jury)

For its captivating, poetic visuals and immersive sound, which draw us into Sado’s history while revealing a universal flaw in the mechanisms of society. (Dávid Fazekas - Student Jury)

A playful and sensorial constellation of images and sounds that compose a map-of-sorts of a territory deployed through the resistance of Ladino language, storytelling and performative gestures. I admire how the frontiers between human and more-than-human elements of land become swiftly blurred through the gorgeous sound design and the suggestive narratives that are unfolded. Also– the editing of this piece is brilliant! I hope I can get to know more of the work of this artist. (Tania Hernández Velasco - Jury)

The very essence of animation; change itself — the melting reality and its colliding fragments, the eternal flow. Animation is capable of transubstantiating light, space and time, directly stirring the abstract dimensions of formless, infinite metamorphosis. In today’s politicized film culture, can works like Deluge stand out? Or is that, too, politics? Does our environment shape this invisible yet omnipresent realm, or is there still a core of natural purity, that animation, an organic reality constantly recreating itself, can grasp? Deluge is the result of immense human labor — hand-drawn frames — and yet it urges us to become inhuman for a few minutes — if pure perception can indeed be called inhuman, if pure perception can still exist at all. (Ádám Hőgye - Student Jury)

The film presents a very complex moral and psychological situation with the tension typical of thrillers. The school environment is not escalated into a model, the creator does not strive to formulate a more general social meaning. It remains to unfold the personal drama, but it realizes it with special power. In all this, its greatest support is the captivating performance of the actress playing the main role. (Gábor Gelencsér - Jury)

For me, the most captivating film was The Loneliness of Lizards by Inês Nunes. Its visuals are beautifully composed, almost painterly; the film manages to be both chilling and calming at the same time. It possesses an exceptional, subtle sense of humor. Thank you for creating such an inspiring world. (Zsóka Arnold - Student Jury)

The story, which authentically and complexly presents the memory of family trauma and the difficulty of forgiveness, works with elaborate motifs in every element. The dramatic arc of the psychologically well-structured situation is regular, yet it hides unexpected twists. We see all this in the interpretations of excellent actors, and the milieu that forms the background of the story is also expressive. A work that continues the best tradition of Iranian cinema – also in the respect that it trusts a lot in the child character: the child as the medium of fateful events. (Gábor Gelencsér - Jury)

Andrej Haring's 'Vienna Crooks' movie is a unique and very funny telling of a story about a group of friends, told from different perspectives in different maffialike settings. (Boglárka Kocsis - Student Jury)

A very short striking audiovisual exploration of the human body, Humanmachine transforms abstract yet recognizable imagery into a vision of the body as a giant living machine. (Alisi Telengut - Jury)

How long does friendship last? Where does love begin? What if friendship spills over into love? I don't know. (Brúnó Rataj - Student Jury)

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