International auteur animation cinema returns to Bagheria, with 29 titles in competition from all over the world. To the German animator Raimund Krumme the Renato Guttuso Award 2025. Opening with musician Alessandro D’Alessandro and composer and songwriter Peppe Servillo.
Eleventh edition for Animaphix – Nuovi Linguaggi Contemporanei Film Festival, which from 29 July to 3 August 2025 will be held in Bagheria (Pa) in the spaces of Villa Cattolica – Museo Guttuso, proposing the best of international auteur animation and presenting films, exhibitions, talks, meetings and in-depth studies. In particular, in this edition the Festival will reflect on different themes and aesthetics, with a focus on current scenarios exacerbated by social inequalities and dramatic conflicts in the world.
Officially opening the eleventh edition of Animaphix – Saturday 29 July at 9 pm at the Villa Cattolica Arena – will be Alessandro D’Alessandro, an organ virtuoso, producer and composer whose music mixes electronics with the national pop repertoire with the concert Canzoni; guest of the evening will be singer-songwriter Peppe Servillo, frontman of Avion Travel.
COMPETITION SECTIONS
29 titles from around the world – 20 countries represented, including productions and co-productions – are distributed across the five competition sections (International, National, Animated Painting, AniDoc, and Experimental). This showcase explores particularly pressing contemporary issues, such as the risk of dystopian futures, disability, and a deeper understanding of the relationship between the sexes. At the same time, it is a provocation of the senses, straddling the boundaries between reality, fiction, and dreams.
Worthy of note in the International section is Bread Will Walk by Alex Boya (Canada, 2025), which imagines a future of famine in which a miraculous bread transforms anyone who eats it into loaves of bread. This year’s short film competition was presented at Cannes; the National section, which includes the Giannalberto Bendazzi Award for best Italian animated short, presents, among others, The Puppet and the Whale by Roberto Catani (Italy, 2024), a free digression on the plot of Collodi’s Pinocchio, and the world premieres of There Was the Moon! by Sicilian director Simone Caramazza (Italy, 2025), a hallucinatory journey into the Sicilian hinterland imbued with Pirandello’s poetics, and Normal Litio by visual artist Massimiliano Marianni (Italy, 2025), which evokes the sensations of disorientation linked to bipolar disorder; the Animated Painting section, which focuses on animated painting films, and boasts titles such as Body of a Shadow by Andrea Muñoz (Colombia, 2024)The dreamlike tale of a woman’s kidnapping, and La vie avec un idiot by Theodore Ushev (France, 2025), inspired by the work of the same name by Victor Erofeev, premiered in Italy after its participation in the latest edition of the Annecy Film Festival. The AniDoc section, inspired by the hybridization of documentary and animation, is enriched by the selection of Percebes by Alexandra Ramires and Laura Gonçalves (Portugal-France, 2024), about the complete life cycle of a mollusk in a locality in the Algarve, which already won the 2024 Annecy Cristal Prize. The Experimental section, devoted to non-narrative experimentation, includes the psychedelic Dull Spots Of Greenish Colours (Germany, 2024) by Sasha Svirsky, about the dependence on electronic devices as mass disruptors in contemporary life.
The films in the various sections will be judged by an international jury composed of German animation director Raimund Krumme, Colombian director and visual artist Carla Melo Gampert, and Iranian-Canadian independent visual artist and animator Arash Akhgari. At the same time, Festival Artistic Director Andrea Martignoni will award the “Fisherman of Sounds” Prize for Best Soundtrack, while the audience will choose the Audience Award for Best Animated Short.
RAIMUND KRUMME
Director Raimund Krumme will be awarded the 2025 Renato Guttuso Prize for his extensive production of artworks and films based on painting. During the Festival, audiences will also be able to learn more about the German artist and filmmaker through the exhibition Traiettorie, which opens on Tuesday, July 29th at 6:30 pm in the Villa Cattolica spaces. The exhibition will focus on his drawings and illustrations—the starting point for the narrative and spatial construction of his films—along with a painting created on-site on a large wall to create a significant visual impact; a complete retrospective of all his short films; and the special big-screen screening in the Arena di Villa Cattolica of two of his cornerstones: Rope Dance (West Germany, 1986) and Crossroads (Germany, 1991), visual virtuosities of a magician who rewrites space, time, and movement through simple lines, simultaneously delineating the challenges inherent in generational relationships between father and son (Rope Dance) and in life in society in general (Crossroads).
The now customary Animakids section, the recreational space at Animaphix designed for the littlest ones, will also be present, featuring workshops and book presentations organized by Libreria Cirasa, the Associazione Tutti nella mia tana, and set designer and illustrator Rosalba Corrao, in collaboration with the publishing house Idee Storte.