One of the world’s largest and most prestigious animation festivals, the five-day Ottawa international Animation Festival (OIAF), ended on Sunday, Sept. 28. Apt613 published articles about the OIAF, both before and during the festival.
You can find the complete list of the OIAF 2025 winners and honourable mentions on the OIAF’s website. To augment this list, I’d like to share the films I particularly loved this year. What can you do with this information? I’ll explain several ways that you can see some of the award winners and audience favourites.
In my mid-festival article, I said that my favourite feature film was the Spanish film Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake. It has a terrific script, great characterizations, and beautiful stop-motion animation. It shows the devastating impact of poverty on 12-year-old Olivia and her little brother Tim with much empathy. Because of Olivia’s resourcefulness and optimism, there’s also gentle humour. Moreover, it celebrates community solidarity. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable film with great impact.
The Quebec film La mort n’existe pas (Death Does Not Exist) won the OIAF’s Grand Prize for Animated Feature. The film’s dreamlike/hallucinatory visuals illustrate a young woman’s struggles with the ethical choices she must make. Because the film is from Quebec, it will very likely get a Canadian distributor, so we should have a chance to see it outside of the festival circuit — either in a cinema or on a streaming service.
I was thrilled and enchanted by another film from Quebec, La jeune fille qui pleurait des perles (The Girl Who Cried Pearls). It was awarded the Canadian Film Institute’s Award for Best Canadian Animation. Its stop-motion animation is exquisite. It tells a tale which is a damning critique of poverty and greed as well as a paean to personal integrity. Since the film is in the NFB’s Collections, it should be available online via various streaming services.
Although I’ve often enjoyed films in the Canadian Student Competition, I wasn’t prepared for Music in My Pocket, a charming biography of an old musician which is wordlessly told with music and beautiful sand animation. Sand animation is a very rarely used animation technique, so it was a pleasant shock to find an animation student using it with such skill. Music in My Pocket received an honourable mention in this competition.
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The Indian film Desi Oon won the Best Commissioned Animation award. It’s a terrific commercial praising a special breed of black sheep that are raised on the Indian subcontinent. All of it — even the backdrops — are made from wool! The music and charming visuals sweep the viewer along until, at the very end, the film derides the fact that, although India’s flocks produce enormous quantities of wool, most of it is discarded in favour of imported acrylic fibre.
The other foreign film I thoroughly enjoyed was Autokar from Belgium and France. It’s an imaginative depiction of the experience of an 8-year-old Polish girl who is travelling, unaccompanied, from Poland to Belgium on a long-distance bus. But instead of humans, the driver and all the passengers are animals. Autokar won the Animation for Teen Audiences 13+ Competition, but I think adults would enjoy it, too. I certainly did!
There’s another way you can see some of the OIAF 2025’s films. The OIAF offers a terrific program called the “Best of Ottawa Program“. This program contains a curated selection of short films, both award winners and audience favourites, drawn from the latest festival. It highlights the myriad of styles, techniques, and perspectives that animation is uniquely capable of. You can organize a screening (in-person or virtual) in your school, theatre or community space for a very reasonable fee. Currently, this program offers a selection from OIAF 2024. The OIAF selection should be available soon.
Happy viewing!
For more information on future events, check out the OIAF website.
