Shorts New Talents Competition: Animation

There is a heightened awareness these days, about boundaries. We are told to set them for our own good - they help us avoid discomfort, and create spaces through which we can contextualise the world. They also, however, can limit us.

In the 2024 New Talents selection, the limitless nature of animation is used to highlight and cut across the boundaries between creation and destruction, the concrete and the abstract, the past and the present, ourselves and other people.

Many films focus on the boundary between parent and child -will our parents understand our desire to bloom? Will they be alright without us? Will they ever stop braiding our hair so tightly?

Other films dwell on our bodies. The temples, prisons, and vessels that present a boundary between us and the world we live in, one which we often transcend. The line between real and unreal vanishes, the spaces around us break down and reform, we weave between memories, and buried desires get pulled to the surface like a carrot.