GLAS Animation Festival Will Relocate To Santa Cruz For A New In-Person Edition

The much-loved GLAS Animation Festival is staging an in-person comeback, but it won’t be next year and it won’t be in Berkeley, California. The festival, which was started by filmmaker Jeanette Jeanenne, is instead targeting a 2024 relocation to the beachside town of Santa Cruz, California.

The festival’s traditional home, Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley, was hit hard by the pandemic and closed its doors for good in May of this year. Without Shattuck as a centrally located home base, the organizers felt it was no longer feasible to host the festival in Berkeley, hence the decision to move.

In 2019, GLAS Animation Festival was canceled by Covid, and the event has been held entirely online since 2020. In April of this year, a lineup of distinguished guest speakers from around the world dialed in to participate, including Cyriak Harris, Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña, Tomek Popakul, Lucrèce Andreae, and Takeshi Murata, among others.

In a release announcing the festival’s relocation, GLAS organizers spoke about the “importance of in-person theatrical exhibition” for animated film and thanked several Berkeley institutions which made the festival possible from its launch in 2016 through its final in-person edition in 2019:

The team at Shattuck Cinemas, the city of Berkeley, and the cluster of other businesses, museums, schools, restaurants, and, most of all, people all over the Bay Area have supported us in innumerable ways over the years, and we can’t begin to thank them enough. We would not have had a festival without you, and it will not be forgotten.

After learning that Shattuck would be closing, the GLAS team spent several months looking for the right place to relocate their festival. Specific location details are still being worked out, but it has been confirmed that GLAS Animation Festival will return to an in-person format to be held in Santa Cruz, California for the first time in 2024.

In the meantime, GLAS will host events in Los Angeles including special screenings, retrospectives, and community hangouts. Artists in the area can follow the organization’s Instagram for up-to-date announcements of upcoming events.