Award Winners of 2026

The winners of the 7th Istanbul International Experimental Film Festival have been announced.

The 25 films in the main competition section were evaluated by jury members Nurşen Bakır, Buse Yıldırım, Wickham Flannagan, Deniz Tortum, and Aslı Kobaner. The jury awarded films that rethink the relationships between body, memory, digital experience, personal narrative, and cinematic form through diverse aesthetic approaches and modes of production.

In the Feature category, Louise Deltrieux’s Dear Makers was awarded for bringing together the material and immaterial memory of wool with the embodied and performative nature of making through a strong visual plasticity, while establishing compelling connections between texture, animation, and a sense of collectivity.

In the Short Film category, Simon Rieth’s The Tragic Movement of the Spheres received the award for its distinctive merging of personal and archival documentary forms with fiction filmmaking, and for constructing the psychology of online life through sound design, found imagery, and an uncanny cinematic atmosphere. In the Documentary category, Matthew Lancit’s Autobiography of my Diabetes was awarded for its direct, open, and intimate confrontation with illness and mortality while maintaining a sense of humor, and for creatively intertwining personal experience with film history.

In the Animation category, Konstantin Von Sichart’s The In-The-Head Film was awarded for transforming doomscroll aesthetics and the feeling of digital navigation into a fluid visual language through inventive techniques, while approaching digital media experience with a formally striking and original cinematic vision. In the First Experiment category, Aitor İbanez’s Île tête nue was recognized for constructing an abstract and powerful visual field of thought around body and identity through its minimal black-and-white aesthetics, use of glitch, and engagement with repetition.

Alongside the awarded films, the jury also gave special mentions to several works across different categories for their distinctive cinematic languages, formal approaches, and the powerful conceptual spaces they opened around memory, space, digital experience, and perception.

In the Feature category, Emilia Beatriz’s barrunto received a Jury Special Mention for its poetic and ironic exploration of nature and the cosmos through textured cinematography, layered sound, and the inventive use of captions. In the Short Film category, Lili Süper’s PRESERVATION OF A MUSE received a Jury Mention for its inventive and unexpected use of the desktop film form, constructing a layered and uncanny cinematic language that continuously transforms the relationship between body, visibility, and performance.

In the Documentary category, Neza Knez’s The Same Sweat is Still Flowing Through the Same Pores received a Jury Special Mention for its poetic visual language that establishes complex connections between geography, personal memory, and the past. In the Animation category, Carlo Galbiati’s Should virtual petz die? received a Special Mention for its sensitive exploration of emotional intimacy between humans and virtual beings through timely and thought-provoking questions. In the First Experiment category, Juana Orbegozo Forero’s The House Left Empty received a Jury Mention for its striking use of the human body within an empty architectural space, making visible both a sense of isolation and the physical and emotional relationship established with everyday spaces.