The 16th edition of Montreal’s Sommets du cinéma d’animation wrapped up yesterday in Canada, and the grand prize winner was awarded to Don Hertzfeldt’s World of Tomorrow, Episode 2: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts, the follow-up to his Oscar-nominated 2015 short World of Tomorrow.

The award for The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts, which had its Canadian premiere at Sommets, was supplemented by a cash prize of C$2000.

Frédérick Tremblay’s Dolls Don’t Cry won the Guy-L.-Coté Award for best animated Canadian film, which came with a cash prize of C$1,500, while Samuel Patthey’s Travelogue Tel Aviv won the Framestore Award for the best film of the International Student Competition, with a cash prize of C$1,000.

The jury was comprised of Pierre-Luc Granjon, François Lévesque, Caroline Dhavernas, Janet Perlman, and Jean-Luc Delhougne.

Besides its competition screenings, Sommets offered a slate of innovative programming at the intersection of animation and the performing arts. This year, one of the screenings combined films with live acrobatic performances by Cirquantique, while another screening showed the films of Joël Vaudreuil against a live performance by the band Cheval fou.

Cheval fou performing during a screening of films by Joël Vaudreuil.
Cheval fou performing during a screening of films by Joël Vaudreuil.

The multidisciplinary approach continued with the well attended five-hour masterclass by Matthew Rankin, who worked with members of the audience to create examples of animation using his experimental light-animation and digital compositing techniques that he’d used on his latest short, The Tesla World Light.

A complete list of Sommets winners is below:

SOMMETS-ÉCOLE NAD GRAND PRIZE, INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

World of Tomorrow Episode Two: The Burden of Other People’s Thoughts
Don Hertzfeldt (USA)

SPECIAL JURY AWARD, INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Nachsaison (Late Season)
Daniella Leitner (Austria)

SPECIAL MENTION, INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Morning Cowboy
Fernando Pomares (Spain)

GUY-L.-COTÉ AWARD FOR THE BEST CANADIAN FILM

Dolls Don’t Cry
Frédérick Tremblay

SPECIAL MENTION, CANADIAN COMPETITION

The Tesla World Light
Matthew Rankin

PUBLIC AWARD

Dolls Don’t Cry
Frédérick Tremblay (Canada)

CAISSE DE LA CULTURE AWARD, INTERNATIONAL VERY SHORT FILMS COMPETITION

Persistence of Vision III
Ismael Sanz-Pena (Norway)

FRAMESTORE AWARD FOR THE BEST STUDENT FILM

Travelogue Tel Aviv
Samuel Patthey (Switzerland)

SPECIAL MENTION, INTERNATIONAL STUDENT COMPETITION

La Table
Eugène Boitsov (France)

ÉCOLE NAD SPECIAL AWARD

(Films from the Québec-Canadian Student Panorama)
The Hoopoe and the Owl
Narges Haghighat

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