A dazzling bunch of graduation films have made their way thorough our open call. We’ll be cherry-picking the most interesting ones and screen them during the Playgrounds International Film Festival. We mean, of course, the short films that are not afraid of technical challenges and aim for the stars in terms of crafts and production, even though their creators are not yet established professionals but still students. One of them will take home an encouraging prize of € 1000,- and the title of Best Student Film.
Here are the wonderful people that we are entrusting this very difficult task! Meet our Student Film Competition judges: Narjes Mohammadi, Monique van Kessel and Michael Hauwert.
Narjes Mohammadi is a writer, illustrator, and animation maker whose practice centres on storytelling and attention to detail. Working across literature, animation, and picture books, she creates worlds filled with joy, connection, and quiet magic. In 2024, she was selected as a Next Talent. Her short animation HI! has been selected at more than 50 international festivals. She is the author and illustrator of over ten children’s books and is currently working on a new picture book to be published by Querido Publishing, alongside her upcoming short animation, Number 22.
Producer Monique van Kessel fully dedicates herself to genre cinema – horror, sci-fi and fantasy – through her Rotterdam-based production company Make Way Film. Recent productions include the feature films The Revelation (2022), Exhibit #8 (2023) and Witte Wieven (2024). She has several new projects are currently in development, among them the feature spin-off Shiny New World, as well as Medusa, Aulken, XX and 11/11. Monique and her team are driven to continue this strong upward momentum and to put the Netherlands firmly on the international map as a home for bold, innovative genre films.
Michael Hauwert aims to find empathetic understanding in his animated films: a connection between people through mutual understanding of inner struggle, always seeking a balance between the personal and the broader context. He finds inspiration in the (multi)cultural and psychological, leveraging his Filipino-Indonesian-Dutch heritage and personal experiences as a starting point for his projects, using animation as a way to simultaneously create distance to and close in on reality – a continuous attempt to find the poetic middle-ground.
