New market opportunities at the Nordic region’s leading animation festival

This year’s Fredrikstad Animation Festival was held in its host city outside of Oslo from October 21 to 25. Dating back to 1994 and the festival Animerte Dager (“Animated Days”) in the Norwegian capital, the annual festival in Fredrikstad has grown to be the Nordic region’s leading festival for animated film.

The 2026 edition encompassed a programme of 113 films, 67 official guests and a total of 28 seminars, panel discussions and workshops. The film programme includes a global short film competition and several competitions for Nordic and Baltic shorts, as well as a competition for animated features from the latter regions. The festival also continues its highlighting of films by animation school students.

The animation fest opened with the Norwegian 3D-animated feature Santa's Workshop (Julenissens verksted), directed by Rasmus A. Sivertsen and Mette Tange, which opens in national theatres next month. The Christmas-themed family film is produced by Qvisten Animation, with funding from Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

Masterclasses were held by, among others, Swedish stop-motion puppet animator and award-winning director Anna Mantzaris and French screenwriter Brice Chevillard. The latter talked about the production of the queer animated feature Jim Queen, which was screened at the festival. This year’s film programme also had a queer focus and a broader diversity perspective, including a LGBTQIA+ Panorama programme, as a result of the programme committees noticing that several of this year’s animated films address this topic.

The festival hosts a market introduced this year, dedicated to animated films, in collaboration with the Nordic Animation Association. The Animated Network Days (AND Market), from October 21 to 23, featured an industry programme that brought together filmmakers, producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers from the Nordics and Baltics, and from the wider international animation community.

“The AND market is a continuation of our industry event, which has been part of the festival for several years. In addition to the market being much bigger this year, we found that it would highlight the section better for all interested professionals to place it under this label. As well as Norwegian and international distributors, we had buyers from the BBC and Danish DR, to mention some of the representatives attending,” says Festival Director Anders Narverud Moen to Nordisk Film & TV Fond.

The Animated Network Days included a case study of the NFTVF-supported Norwegian feature A Mouse Hunt for Christmas (Hvis ingen går i fella), which was the most watched film in national cinemas last year, on hybrid animation/live-action production. Other programme posts in the market section were the Storyline Production Pitch for animated feature projects, a masterclass on sustainability in animation production, and Meet the Financiers, featuring Nordisk Film & TV Fond’s new fiction advisor Cecilie Aspenes along with regional funders from the Nordics – to name just a few headlines.

At the awards ceremony, the festival’s top honour Grand Prix was awarded the Estonian/Ukranian short film Kyiv Cave (Kiievi tort) by director Mykyta Lyskov, portraying “a family in Ukraine and the difficulties they face”. An Estonian film also won the prize for Best Film in the Nordic-Baltic Short Film Competition, which went to Uka-uka by Erik Heinsalu. The French film God Is Shy (Dieu est timide), directed by Jocelyn Charles, won the award for Best Global Short Film, while Honami Yano’s French/Japanese film Eri received an honourable mention in the global shorts section.

The winner of the Nordic-Baltic Student Film Competition was Things That I Was Gathering by Ekaterina Zhuzhleva, from the European Joint Master in Animation, RE:Anima, at Aalto University (Finland), LUCA School of Arts (Belgium) and Lusófona University (Portugal). New of this year is the festival hosting a FIPRESCI jury, which awards a film from the Global Short Film and Nordic-Baltic Short Film competition programmes. The international critics jury gave their FIPRESCI Award to the before-mentioned Estonian film Uka-uka.

A Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to this year’s guest of honour, Finnish educator Eija Saarinen, who is a central figure and long-time administrative leader of Finland’s animation education in Turku. Together with Estonian filmmaker Priit Pärn, Saarinen established and developed the globally acclaimed programme at Turku Animation School (Turku Arts Academy), known for its hand-drawn, darkly humorous and surrealistic aesthetics – the so-called “Turku School” style.

The Audience Award went to the already mentioned Swedish director Anna Mantzaris’ stop-motion animated short Please (Sweden/France/Czech Republic/Norway/Finland).

In the section for longer formats, the award for Best Film in the Nordic-Baltic Feature Film Competition also went to a Swedish film, namely Dante (Dante & miljonerna) by Linda Hambäck. The who-dunnit story for young children adapted from Frida Nilsson’s book “Me and Dante at the Dump” is co-produced by Norway and Denmark, with support from NFTVF.

The young audiences were also represented with a jury, who gave their Nordic-Baltic Young Audience Competition Award to the German/Norwegian/Czech short 9 Million Colors (9 milionů barev), directed by Bára Anna. Special mention from the young jury was given to Brian Christopher Hawkins’ The Wolf Has Come (Ulven har kommet) (Norway/USA). Furthermore, the award in the Nordic-Baltic Children’s Film Competition went to the Finnish short film Woollen Sock (Villasukka) by Katariina Haukka, with special mention to Endre Lund Eriksen and Isak Gjertsen’s Norwegian/Croatian short Nora's Ark (Noras Ark). Rounding off the list of awards, Joni Männistö’s WTF?! - 16th Anibar Animation Festival Trailer (Finland/Kosovo) won the Nordic-Baltic Commissioned Film Competition.

Fredrikstad Animation Festival 2026 has received funding from Nordisk Film & TV Fond.