Laura Anahory's animated short film is part of the official selection of La Cinef, the Cannes Film Festival's competitive section dedicated to school films.
The film “The Bird from Within”, directed by young filmmaker Laura Anahory and produced by the School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University of Porto, has been selected by La Cinef for the 2025 edition of the Cannes Film Festival.
This short film is animated in 2D and mixed media, exploring the daily struggles of mental health and its manifestations in the physical body. The film is motivated by a personal and intimate need to represent the great effort required to maintain a balance between mental and physical health. The technique used aims to exploit the elasticity of animation to address, in the exaggeration of the animated metamorphic body, the intimate relationship between body and mind.
La Cinef is an official section of the Cannes Film Festival dedicated to discovering and supporting new talents in world cinema. Created in 1998 under the name Cinéfondation and renamed La Cinef in 2022, this section annually selects short and medium-length films made by students from film schools around the world, serving as an important starting point for filmmakers who later achieved international recognition, such as Jessica Hausner, Asif Kapadia, or Nadav Lapid.
