Denis Do’s Funan won the Cristal, the top award at the 2018 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Variety reported. Funan is centred on a Cambodian family grappling with several hardships caused by the brutal reign of the Khmer Rouge.
The festival was held from June 11-16 in Annecy, France. Nora Twomey’s Oscar-nominated drama The Breadwinner won the Jury Award and the coveted Audience Award. The film is an adaptation of Deborah Ellis’s 2000 novel of the same name, about a young girl in Afghanistan who dresses up as a boy to support her family after her father is imprisoned by the Taliban.
The Breadwinner is available on Netflix in India.
Cristobal Leon and Joaquín Cocina’s The Wolf House won the Jury distinction award. The stop-motion horror movie, about a woman who takes refuge in a house in Chile, won the Caligari Film Prize at the 2018 Berlinale.
Among the animated shorts, the Cristal went to Nienke Deutz’s Bloeistraat 11, the story of two young girls whose friendship is deeply affected by the onset of puberty. Martina Scarpelli’s black-and-white hand-drawn animation Egg, about a woman’s experience of anorexia, won the Jean-Luc Xiberras Award for a First Film.
Trevor Jimenez’s Weekends, about a child who is forced to shuttle between his recently divorced parents, won the Audience and Jury Awards in the short films categories, while the Jury Distinction prize went to Veljko Popovic’s Cyclistes.
Two episodes of Erik Oh’s PIG: The Dam Keeper Poems, produced by Tonko House, were awarded the top Cristal for television series.
Animator and filmmaker Brad Bird was awarded a special prize at the festival. His credits as director include The Iron Giant (1999), The Incredibles (2004), Ratatouille (2007), and The Incredibles 2 (2018).
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