GIRAF International Festival of Independent Animation

***Please note: To submit for free, please visit http://giraffest.ca, or use the Friends of GIRAF category with the password that's in the rules and terms below. Otherwise we charge a small submission fee through FilmFreeway to help manage the number of submissions we receive as we have a very small previewing team, and free festivals receive an absurd number of submissions that are often unrelated to the festival's mandate. All submission fees we receive go to a prize for the jury award-winning films.***

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 Evan DeRushie, Renee Zhan, 24MemesPerSecond, Anna Firth, 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

In 2022 we were happy to bring the festival back to the cinema with in-person screenings, however we learned over the pandemic that GIRAF does have an audience online. And screening a festival through secure online platforms does make these films accessible to communities of people that might not be able to make it to the cinema. So in 2024 GIRAF was offered in a hybrid (online and in-person) festival format for the first time in it's 18 year history. We are hoping to keep this mix of in-person and online format for GIRAF 20!