7th Dec 2023

  Annecy Festival Residency 2024 Selection! 

The Annecy Festival Residency will hold its 4th edition from 5th April to 28th June 2024 and host 3 new artists in the Papeteries – Image Factory to work on the visual identity of their animation feature films.

Here’s a few key figures, the 2024 edition of the Annecy Festival Residency includes:

  • 36 submissions
  • 25 different nationalities
  • 42% of the projects are led by women

The selection committee had the delicate task of putting together an eclectic and equitable selection from these submissions. The goal was to identify projects that would reap the full benefits of the Residency, ensure an overall coherence, and demonstrate their appeal for the animation film industry.

The selection committee is a broad-based group of animation professionals whose purpose is to thoroughly analyse the projects. For this 2024 edition, Damien Brunner (Producer, Folivari), Valérie Yendt (Distributor, Gebeka Films), Aurel (Cartoonist, Director), Sara Wikler (Script Doctor) and Jean-Christophe Roger (Director) collectively selected:

  • Le Cabanon de l’oncle Jo by Marie Deboissy (France) – Production: Offshore/White Star (France)
    1967. With a heavy heart, 9-year-old Lili leaves Tunisia with her mother. She is going to live with her Auntie Denise and Uncle Jo in Saint-Denis. Lili doesn’t like it there. The buildings are grey, Auntie Denise is a cleaning fanatic, Uncle Jo is uncommunicative, the five cousins are noisy and the group of kids that hang around the streets call her a "dirty foreigner".
    Escaping the neighbourhood hostility and her family, Lili decides to transform a piece of wasteland in the middle of the city into a luxuriant garden with jasmine, just like in Tunisia.
  • Zako by Tigran Arakelyan (Armenia) – Production: OnOff Studio (Armenia), Sacrebleu Productions (France), Broom Films (Lithuania)
    The film is based on a true story. Zako is the name German soldiers gave to Soviet-Armenian painter Sargis Mangasaryan during the Second World War. Zako was in charge of drawing his tormentors’ portraits. Thanks to his talent, he survived the hell of the camps and avoided being exiled in Siberia.
    In 1956, while visiting the famous Picasso exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, he was deeply moved by Guernica, which brought back his own memories of WWII.
  • Insectarium by Sofía Carrillo (Mexico) – Production: Pimienta Films (Mexico)
    In a world where insects have become extinct, Cerulia works cataloging and preserving specimens for the private collection of a renowned entomologist. One afternoon, as she leaves work, she accidentally knocks a valuable moth off the pin holding it in place. In an attempt to hide the evidence, she takes the moth home, only to discover that it comes back to life.

To find out more about the Annecy Festival Residency, head to its special page and check out previous editions in images: