The juries of Anifilm 2025

Just like every year, we have invited film professionals to choose the best creations competing at Anifilm 2025. The jurors will form four juries and some of the jurors will also present their own works at the festival.

The Award for Best Game for Children, Best Visual Art in Game and the newly established Award for Best Student Computer Game will be presented by a jury composed of British illustrator and artist Chris Lewis Lee, who creates games with intricate, mythology-inspired landscapes; Jindřich Skeldal, the author of numerous games including the hit Beat Saber; and French/American art director and games creator Zoé Nguyen Tranh, whose credits include Return to Monkey Island and The Sexy Brutale.

The trio tasked with choosing the best music video, VR film and abstract and non-narrative animation at Anifilm includes awarded Austrian filmmaker Thomas Renoldner, whose experimental slapstick comedy Don’t Know What won many prizes; Slovakian graphic artist and animator Kriss Sagan, who makes VR projects and focuses on animating paintings and illustrations with AR; and independent US animator Josh Shaffner, who employs his unique painterly style of animation in film, television and commercial productions and whose latest film, In Dreams, was a festival hit.

Short and student films will be assessed by a jury featuring French historian and author Xavier Kawa-Topor, the founder of the Blink Blank magazine and director of the NEF Animation Association, which organises artistic residencies for filmmakers. He will be joined by acclaimed film personalities Diana Cam Van Nguyen, renowned for her personal and artistically refined anidocs (including her latest Love, Dad); and Polish author Tomek Popakul, whose films full of drama and made in his typical harsh style often focus on younger generations. They include Acid Rain and Zima, which received awards at Anifilm in previous years.

The best feature films for adults and for children and young audiences will be selected by Anne Gaschütz, the director of Filmfest Dresden and a member of a selection committee at Locarno Film Festival; Egyptian historian and director Mohamed Ghazala, an associate professor of animation at the Cinematic Arts School at Effat University in Saudi Arabia and author of books on Arab and African animation; and Argentinean illustrator and animator Diego Polieri, who has contributed to projects such as Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and the series Scavengers Reign and Love, Death & Robots.

Detailed information and all jurors find here.