BEAST 2025 AWARDS
The winners of the Official Competition of the eighth edition of BEAST are already known! This year, the festival attributed a prize and a jury mention for each category. The best fiction, documentary, experimental and animation works were awarded by this year’s jury.
EAST WAVE AWARD for Best Fiction Film
Left-Handed Pen, by Adas Burksaitis
Lithuania | 2024 | 18’
Sunny summer day at a suburban school. A schoolteacher finds out that her son’s poorly written exam may jeopardise his dream of attending a prestigious university abroad. The film explores sacrifices a mother is willing to make to secure her child’s success, raising questions about ethics and the pressures of education.
JURY MENTION
OOTID, by Eglė Razumaitė
Lithuania | 2024 | 10’
Girls at summer camp raise different versions of what happened to one of their friends who had to leave the camp and go home.
EAST DOC AWARD for Best Documentary
Ludmila’s Apple Pie, by Loukia Hadjiyianni
Cyprus, Georgia, Germany | 2024 | 14’
Ludmila bakes an apple pie while recalling life in the Soviet Union, sharing memories with her granddaughter behind the camera.
JURY MENTION
The Sun is Low, by Marta Ojrzyńska
Poland | 2024 | 18’
After breaking up with her partner, a mother takes her eight-year-old son on a camper trip. Now these two will be able to start their lives just together. The journey is accompanied by very insightful and moving conversations between mother and son and painted landscapes. The roles of mother and son are reversed during this short expedition. It is a road movie that becomes a metaphor for the life of a mother and her child.
experimentalEAST AWARD for Best Experimental Film
Hollowgram, by Laura Iancu
Romania, USA | 2025 | 7’
Hollowgram conjures varicolored clusters of swirling images and sounds from places real and imagined, as if looking through a flip book in a dream. Narratively, the film pilots the tension between the desire to share memories and possibilities with another and the failure of the attempt. Conceptually layered over, a defiant authorial selfhood responds to the outside interrogations that punch in, “Who do you think you are?”.
JURY MENTION
Nights and Days, by Daniela Sláviková
Slovakia | 2024 | 16’
How hard is it to be a girl? How hard it is to be a sister? An intimate dialogue between two sisters in a hotel room gradually unveils the struggles and joys and nights and days of girlhood entwined with an unspoken family secret.
ANIMA EAST AWARD for Best Animation Film
Can You Hear Me?, by Anastazja Naumenko
Slovakia | 2024 | 6’
How hard is it to be a girl? How hard it is to be a sister? An intimate dialogue between two sisters in a hotel room gradually unveils the struggles and joys and nights and days of girlhood entwined with an unspoken family secret.
JURY MENTION
FREERIDE IN C, by Edmunds Jansons
Latvia | 2024 | 10’
The white tranquility of mountains is disturbed by colorful winter sports enthusiasts who enjoy downhill skiing. The short film is an audiovisual experience, an abstract dance of freedom that reflects the joy and fragility of being.
