Cristal Winner Anca Damian Returns To Annecy With New Short ‘Motherhood’ (EXCLUSIVE TRAILER)

A new trailer has been released for Motherhood, the latest animated short from acclaimed Franco-Romanian filmmaker Anca Damian, which is competing in the official short film competition at this year’s Annecy Festival.

Cartoon Brew has been given exclusive access to the film’s trailer, which can be seen below.

A semi-autobiographical work based on Damian’s own experiences with motherhood, the short’s synopsis reads:

From the first rules imposed since birth to the turbulent tides of maternity, Motherhood traces one woman’s intimate journey through memory, dream, and surreal imagery. Drawing on her own life, the filmmaker deconstructs reality to reconstruct her inner world — questioning what it truly means to become a mother today, and what it costs to live. Through the poetry of animation, the film resists easy answers, offering instead images and sounds born from the deepest recesses of the imagination: raw, ambivalent, and entirely personal.

The project marks Damian’s latest outing following features such as Marona’s Fantastic Tale and The Island. Her earlier animated feature Crulic – The Path to Beyond won the Annecy Cristal in 2012 and established her as one of Europe’s leading auteurs.

Damian explained why animation was essential to the project, saying:

Motherhood is an autobiographical film — it draws directly on my own memories, and on dreams I have actually had. Animation felt like the only medium capable of rendering the intensity and ambivalence of what motherhood has stirred in me over the years: the surreal, the poetic, the contradictory.

She added that the film grew from a desire to examine the expectations imposed on people from childhood and the challenges of forging an identity beyond them.

We are shaped from childhood by rules we never chose. We are taught how to behave, how to live — yet no one prepares us for the difficulty of truly becoming.