2024 : Mohammed Beyoud

The Giannalberto Bendazzi Prize Committee, made up of the 4 members of the PIAFF team, the first two winners of the prize: Marco de Blois and Nancy Denney-Phelps, and the director Florentine Grelier, has decided to award its prize this year to a personality who has not only promoted the art of animation but has also, thanks to his work, enabled a new emergence of animation cinema in his country.

We all know how important festivals are in highlighting cinema in general and animation in particular. It is thanks to them that new talented filmmakers are discovered every year, that demanding and often independent auteur films find their audience, and that new generations of spectators sharpen their eyes and their critical spirit.

We have chosen to pay tribute to a man who believes deeply in the importance of this transmission and who, for the past 23 years, has been working to bring the world’s animated films to a wide audience, offering the most emblematic contemporary films as well as older or more confidential cinema. Mohamed Beyoud sees animation as an art form without frontiers, and therefore for everyone, and has made FICAM, the Meknès International Animated Film Festival, of which he has been artistic director for 23 years, one of the world’s leading animation events.

With the incredible support of the Aïcha Foundation and the Institut français de Meknès, the Festival offers a programme that mixes content and refuses to make distinctions between styles or genres, putting all forms of animation on an equal footing. To mark the centenary of the birth of the great director Norman McLaren, the children of Meknes were able to see a short film by the man who remains one of the great masters of abstraction and experimentation, before each feature film. Over the years, festival-goers have also been able to meet Isao Takahata, Paul Driessen, Vincent Patar and Stéphane Aubier, Florence Miailhe, Peter Lord and so many other great names in picture-in-picture.

FICAM is also about opening up to a continent. From its very beginnings, the festival has welcomed leading figures in African animation such as Mustapha Alassane and Jean-Michel Kibushi. Director Sofia El Khyari presented several short films and an exhibition. And so it has gone on, year on year, reinforcing the desire not just to show films, but to foster vocations, encourage careers and support projects. A desire that has taken concrete form with the creation of the festival’s French-language residency, enabling a whole new generation of filmmakers to come to the fore.

It is this work that has led to a genuine revival of animation in Morocco today, with the emergence of both independent filmmakers and an industry represented today by several studios and local productions of series intended for national television channels. Mohamed Beyoud is obviously a stakeholder in these changes, taking part in numerous conferences and committees, and in a global reflection on how to better produce and promote animated films, but also by working in a very concrete way for cinema in general, as he did in fighting tenaciously to revive the magnificent Caméra cinema in Meknès.

Few people have contributed so much through their work to the development of animated film on a national – and continental – scale. It is therefore with great pleasure that the committee awards the Giannalberto Bendazzi 2024 Prize to Mohammed Beyoud.