Benjamin Massoubre fell in love with animation when he di scovered its richness and vari ety at the Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival. He started as an editor and had the chance to work on many animated featu re films which earned him memb ership of both the A.C.E and the AMPAS. He collaborated with Jérémy Cl apin on I Lost My Body, with  Rémi Chayé on Long way north  and Calamity: A childhood of Martha Jane Cannary and with  Patrick Imbert on The Summit of the Gods. His first feature  film as director : Little Nicholas happy as can be ! was selected at the Cannes Film Festival and also received the Cristal for best feature at the  Annecy international animation  Festival in 2022. Benjamin will talk about his passion for animation and his career in the medium. He is going to take us behind the scenes and explain how  " Little Nicholas" was made : from the script and storyboarding stages to animation, coloring or music, it will be a complete walkthrough of the entire production. 

Max Hattler is a German experimental animator. He is a Professor at the School of Creative Media at City University of Hong Kong. His works explore relationships between abstraction and figuration, aesthetics and politics, sound and image, and precision and improvisation. Max holds a BA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, an MA in Animation from the Royal College of Art, and a Doctorate in Fine Art from the University of East London. His films have been presented at museums, galleries and festivals internationally. Awards include London International Animation Festival, Annecy Animation Festival, and several Visual Music Awards. He’s also active in the field of audiovisual performance. He has performed live at Sonar Hong Kong, Seoul Museum of Art, Animafest Zagreb, the European Media Art Festival, and many others. Max has been on the jury of many festivals including Filmfest Dresden, Animafest Zagreb, CutOut Fest Mexico, Punto y Raya Festival and Tehran International Animation Festival. He is also the chairman and curator of Relentless Melt, a Hong Kong-based society for experimental animation which regularly presents screenings around the world.

Daniel Šuljić is an animation film director and a musician. Born in Zagreb, from 1992 to 2010 he lived in Vienna, and from 2010 on he has been living and working in both cities. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, and from 1992 to 1998 painting and animation at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Masterclass C. L. Attersee, where he graduated. From 2005 to 2008 he was a lecturer of classical animation at the Institute for Media Design at the University of Art and Design in Linz, and in 2006 he was given the title of honorary professor at Jilin College of the Arts Animation School in Changchun, China. From 2010 to 2012 he served as an artistic consultant for animated film at the Croatian Audiovisual Centre, and from 2013 to 2017 he was a member of the artistic council for film in the City of Zagreb. His films (selection) Evening Star (1993), Leckdonalds (1995), The Cake (1997), Sun, Salt and Sea (1997), Ich kann es mir sehr gut vorstellen (I Can Imagine It Very Well, 2004), Kurzes Leben (Short Life, 2007, co-dir. Johanna Freise), Transparency (2015), From Under Which Rock Did They Crawl Out (2018) were shown at several hundred international and national film festivals, different TV channels across Europe and earned numerous international awards. He is a member of festival juries and had several retrospectives (Anifilm Trebon, Monstra Lisabon, ITFS Stuttgart). Since 2018 he is an assistant professor at the Department of Animation and New Media, Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb and the Croatian ambassador of the European Animation Awards. Since 2011 he has been the artistic director of the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb.