The curtain has come down on a most unusual edition of Annecy. Held in a hybrid format for the first time, the festival drew more than 8,000 badgeholders, half of them onsite — a significant drop from the peak of 12,300 in 2019, but a notable achievement in the circumstances.
Not that any of this affected the quality of the competition, the results of which were announced over the weekend. On the feature side, the big winner was Flee, which took home the Cristal and Gan Foundation Award. Already honored at Sundance, the documentary tells the story of a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark who harbors a big secret. Neon will release the film in North America.
Afghanistan also figures in My Sunny Maad, the first animated feature from Michaela Pavlátová, in which a Czech woman moves to Kabul to be with her husband. The film won the Jury Award. In the Contrechamp competition, the prize went to Bob Spit — We Do Not Like People, a stop-motion documentary of sorts based on the work of Brazilian cartoonist Angeli. The feature was originally supposed to play last year, but the pandemic delayed production.
