An annual animation festival that runs each November at the Globe Cinema in Calgary, Alberta, GIRAF celebrates the spirit of independent, underground, and experimental animation, showcasing Canadian animators and presenting diverse animations from around the globe.
Presented by the Quickdraw Animation Society, a non-profit dedicated to the art of animation, GIRAF is committed to creating greater awareness for animation as an art form. We do this through interactive activities including workshops, artist talks, installations, live performances, and visiting artists (recent guest artists include MidKnife Films, Phil Tippet, Amanda Strong, Sean Buckelew, Amy Lockhart, Kirsten Lepore, Caleb Wood, among many others), and through thoughtfully curated screenings.
Our festival focuses on presenting works that push boundaries through the development of new techniques, hybrid forms of creation, and challenging subject matter, and love discovering artists and films that have been missed by other festivals. Mostly, we are looking for independent and artful animated films to share with our audience in Calgary. That can mean abstract or narrative, hand-drawn or computer-generated, student films or well-established professionals, or somewhere in between. We want films we can be excited about, films that are pushing forward what animation can do, and films that make us feel things (even if that feeling is just "oh my gosh, this is ridiculous").
If you want a better sense of what we love, feel free to check out our past selections at http://giraffest.ca, or our ongoing Vimeo channel at https://vimeo.com/channels/indiemixtape
No commercial work, please — some of those are super cool, but commercials, explainers, festival stingers and those sorts of things fall outside our festival mandate. Music videos are a grey area, and we don't book them very often, but if you've made a particularly amazing one, feel free to give it a shot.
Also, this festival is aimed at adults, and so we rarely book work that is explicitly targeted to children.
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