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11th December 2004: The official prize awarding of 30 October at Teatro San Carlo. A report, the videos, the photographs.
THE COMPLETE LIST OF ANIMOWEB 2004 WINNERS
MICHELA MIRAGLIA'S INTRODUCTION WITH MORENA DIAZZI
After the buffet dinner offered by Modena Province at Sala dei Cardinali and the review of animated films from Canada and France, the official prize awarding ceremony of aniMOweb 2004 started at Teatro San Carlo at 9 p.m.
The talented young actress Michela Miraglia as presenter of the ceremony was able to take the audience through the 3 hours and 15 minutes of the prize awarding until beyond 12 p.m. She was able to direct the show among the contributions of the special guests, of the prize winners with their movies and the awarding of the extra prizes by the sponsors. Andrea Cavazzuti was showing the movies with a computer while Giorgio Ghirardini of VideoArt was audio-video directing. The prize awarding ceremony was being broadcast in real time at Caffe' Concerto in Piazza Grande, Modena again with the technical support of Giorgio Ghirardini and the presence for the aniMOweb staff of Elisa Rossi and Alessandro Meo.
MICHELA MIRAGLIA's introduction 
The programme started with the introduction of Michela Miraglia on the features of aniMOweb contest and subsequently the interview with Morena Diazzi, Councillor for Equal Opportunities, as the representative of Modena Province, main sponsor of the contest. Morena Diazzi had already viewed all the submitted movies and, being glad about the results, had always promoted the event in first person. Together with thanking the authors, the guests and the audience, she illustrated the motives that led her Council to accept the challenge of aniMOweb.
MORENA DIAZZI's contribution
THE FLASHANIMATHON
The teacher of Istituto d'arte Venturi di Modena Antonella Battilani and the founder of Melazeta Matteo Stanzani (also Member of Asifa Italia) explained the reasons for the second edition of FlashAnimathon. The animation marathon with Flash had started Monday, 25 October and had ended with the editing of the DVD on the evening of Friday, 29 November. 10 students of art had been producing 4 movies in Flash and a backstage video of the workshop. Antonella and Matteo talked about their work and the important results they had obtained, considering the fact that the 9 female students and 1 male student had been able to create the 4 trailers on aniMOweb and the themes of women without knowing Flash before.
First the backstage video was shown to the public. Then the 4 movies of FlashAnimathon were proposed. The audience voted the best and assigned the students some copies of The-Tab Lite version of the value of €79 each. The same Istituto d'Arte Venturi received a copy of The-Tab version 2.2 of the value of €395 from Digital Video. All the students taking part in the workshop then got onto the stage to be handed over the precious copies of this software by Michela Miraglia.
The FLASHANIMATHON with ANTONELLA BATTILANI and MATTEO STANZANI
The backstage of FlashAnimathon
FlashAnimathon movies
FlashAnimathon prize awarding
FlashAnimathon movies:
Un bacio (A Kiss)
E' bello essere donna perche'.... (It is good to be a woman, since...)
Opposizioni (Oppositions)
Evoluzione (Evolution)
FABIO PIN AND GIULIA BALLADORE
Michela Miraglia afterwards called some members of the jury to introduce each section of the contest and to present some of their works.
Before the prize awarding of the section of intros, it was then the turn of Fabio Pin who proposed a series of intros produced for the company Ikon Multimedia intermingled with intros submitted to web festivals and contests. In the end Fabio showed a videoclip he had created for aniMOweb on the female personages by Giulia Balladore, as an homage to the young cartoonist from Pavia. Giulia's characters, gently animated by Fabio, enchanted the audience, charmed by such pure beauty of digital and imaginary heroines, yet so real and recognizable.
FABIO PIN's contribution
The videoclip about GIULIA BALLADORE
RICCARDO SAI
Subsequently the spots Equilibrismi and Crescita Rapida (Rapid Growth) by director Riccardo Sai were proposed. They had been produced about the themes of equal opportunities and the law on parental leaves for Rete Donne e Lavoro and Centro di Documentazione Donna of Bolzano Province. The second was presented for the first time in Italy at aniMOweb, before being showed in the cinema theatres of Trentino Alto Adige region.
RICCARDO SAI's spots
THE PRIZE AWARDING
For all the sections the ceremony started with the audience prize awarding, followed by the special prizes and then the third, second and first official prize.
Before the last week of the contest, aniMOweb editorial staff had invited the participants for the concluding day of 30 October. Once some had answered the invitation, aniMOweb editorial staff decided not to inform whether they had won prizes on the evening of 29th October or on the morning of 30th October. This was to have a total surprise effect during the prize awarding. Unfortunately, this decision resulted in a kind of boomerang because some authors who had promised to come were not present. Furthermore, 2 authors who had led a seminar in the morning and in the afternoon left before the prize awarding, perhaps in the belief that, since they had not been informed, they had won no prizes.
If a winner was not present (this is the case of the international prizes) one of the people who had worked at aniMOweb 2004 was called onto the stage to receive the prize.
Michela Miraglia proclaimed the winners and interviewed them shortly. She had prepared appropriate questions for each winner.
THE PRIZE AWARDING OF THE INTROS
As for the section of Intros the first prize was the special international prize of €100. It was assigned to the students of Singapore Nanyang Polytechnic Edwin Yap Wei Jian, Winnie Li, Edwin Lim, Sun Hui Li for Career and Time. Antonella Battilani, coordinator of FlashAnimathon, reveived the prize on their behalf.
The prize to EDWIN YAP WEI JIAN, WINNIE LI, EDWIN LIM, SUN HUI LI with ANTONELLA BATTILANI
The awarding of the third prize of €300 to Simona Montini followed. Her intro Women's Times illustrated a typical day in the life of women between past times and present times. The symbol of the hanging clothes line is the trait d'union of women of all times.
SIMONA MONTINI's prize awarding
The second prize of €700 coincided with the audience prize of €100: Hermes Mangialardo received the right tribute for the story of the typical day of his hyperactive digital Mary.
The audience could finally realize how this Mary was based on a real Mary who, amused, was filming the scene with a camera.
HERMES MANGIALARDO's prize awarding
It was time to award the first prize to the Italian-Argentinean Daniela Marsino. She is the first female author to win a prize of €1.500 in three editions of aniMOweb. Considering that the theme is Women and Equal Opportunities, the representatives of the Council for Equal Opportunities of Modena Province would have been very glad to assign the young author the right tribute. Daniela Marsino's work The Race was the favourite of the jury and of this Council since it conveys the message that women have to overcome higher obstacles in the working world in comparison with men. This because they have to give birth and raise children, but if fathers offered more help in the care of children, in this hypothetical race, families would only gain and women would get more job opportunities.
Daniela was in Modena in the morning and had led a seminar. Since she had not been told that she had won, she had travelled back to Bologna in the late afternoon. After some concern when we realized she was not there, Isa Ferraguti was called onto the stage to receive the prize. She is Consigliera di Parità of Modena Province and was senator of the Republic. She announced she would broadcast some of the movies of aniMOweb during the TV program of Consigliere di Parità in local TVs.
Daniela Marsino would receive her cheque of €1.500 Thursday, 11 November during a webmatch organised by webmatch.org and yo-yoll.net at La Scuderia Café in Bologna (Piazza Verdi) where aniMOweb was special guest.
The prize to DANIELA MARSINO with Isa Ferraguti
A video of aniMOweb as special guest at Webmatch in Bologna with Daniela Marsino's prize awarding
THE FLASHGODDESS PRIZES
After the prize awarding of the intros, the ceremony went on with the FlashGoddesses prizes.  Ann Marie Cheung, the founder with Oriental looks of the site of the Flash Goddesses, had sent a video in which she announced the FlashGoddesses prizes. The audience could learn from the voice of Ann Marie the names of the winners. These prizes were assigned by flashgoddess.com editorial staff (Ann Marie and Helene Bordeaux). The movies of the winners, one for each section, were shown to the public: Ilaria Bonello's for the intros, Teresa Piccininno's for the interactive applications and Yulia Malinskaya's for the short films. An additional prize for Francesca Magliani for one of the splash pages of aniMOweb was also announced by the voice of Ann Marie and the opportunity to show the three of them was taken. The FlashGoddesses prizes consist in the publication of the interviews with the selected authors and their references in the section Gallery or in the section Profiles of this prestigious site.
FLASHGODDESS prizes and the video with ANN MARIE CHEUNG
VERONIQUE BROSSIER
It was then the turn of Veronique Brossier who was to introduce the prize awarding of the videogames and interactive applications section. Her contribution was translated by Michela Miraglia and Andrea Cavazzuti. Among the innumerable works illustrated in the afternoon, Veronique re-proposed in a more detailed way a videogame consistent with the themes of women and equal opportunities. The game had been created for a travelling exhibition in the United States and Canada. The purpose of the game was to sensitise people on the problem of disparity of conditions in undertaking business women have had to endure during the centuries. The audience was astonished in discovering that for instance only 4% of funds to finance activities go to females, while Veronique remarked that the fundamental way to emancipate for women is to become independent economically, as the videogame demonstrates.
VERONIQUE BROSSIER's contribution
The game Mind your own business created by Veronique Brossier about enterprising women.
THE PRIZE AWARDING OF GAMES AND INTERACTIVITY
The prize awarding of the games and interactivity section then took place. In the beginning Michela Miraglia invited Teresa Piccininno onto the stage to receive a special prize of the jury (€ 100). Her interactive work And i am your son had already been proposed to the audience during the FlashGoddesses prize awarding, so a video prepared by the author from Puglia for aniMOweb was shown. The video was set in Turitto (Bari) and narrated the social and cultural background that had inspired the interactive application of Teresa. It was a story of male emigration, in which the mothers, the wives and the daughters were left alone in the native country and had to manage with the difficulties of life without the emotional support of their husbands and fathers.
TERESA PICCININNO's prize awarding
Teresa Piccininno's video (compressed version)
Michela Miraglia subsequently announced the audience prize to Gaia Soavi (as in the previous edition) for the game Equal Opportunities, in which some of the activities of an ordinary woman are ironically presented when after going shopping, taking children to school and tidying the house, she finally can go to work…
As the author from Piacenza was absent, the third and second prize winners were announced. Since they were from abroad and obviously not present, the movies were performed from the DVD and commented through the reading of the jury's motives.
The third prize was assigned to the Russian-Israeli Dmitry Zheltobryukov, future citizen of Spain, for the amusing and exciting game in which the player is in the shoes of a beginner waitress, a recurring situation for many young women and female students of modern times. Imitating the difficult life of a waitress who has to cope with nervous customers and with endless tasks resulted in a successful interesting game.
The Singapore Nanyang Polytechnic students won the €700 of the second prize thanks to a simple successful game with didactic aims. It is useful to know deeper the biographies of some heroines and protagonists of history, like Cleopatra, Wu Ze Tian, Joanne of Arc and Elizabeth I.
The prize to GAIA SOAVI
The prizes to DMITRY ZHELTOBRIUKOV and LIAN YIHAN, EDDY, FARA, JINRU with LIVIANA MESSORI
It was then the time for the prize awarding to Maurizio Brancaleoni, winner for the second time of the €1.500 of the 1st prize in the game section. The programmer from Verona had already won the 1st prize in 2002 edition with a quiz game on tourism in the Modenese territory. He was also one of the three authors (with Gaia Soavi and Manuela Scognamiglio) who had taken part in all the editions of aniMOweb. The game Kreta, winner of this edition, re-proposes the myth of Ariadne and the Minotaur and depicts the character of Theseus in an ironic way. The same author underlies that in view of the behaviour of this fake hero ready to run away, the main character Ariadne should not have struggled so much against the Minotaur. This game by Maurizio Brancaleoni was created with Director and remains one of the best in the history of aniMOweb. It could be one of the games we are never tired of playing even after a long time. Only some successful classic games obtain this result.
MAURIZIO BRANCALEONI's prize awarding
DARIO PICCIAU
At this time Dario Picciau should have introduced the short films section. Unfortunately, urgent and sudden work motives called the Milanese director to Geneva, so the audience had to renounce seeing the famous artist of Italian 3D animation cinema, author of The Egg. Dario had played an important role the day before during the jury works. He had been crucial in assigning the prizes of section C of short films, the category of the contest which is nearer to his artistic background and cinema career.
The interview with DARIO PICCIAU in SKYTV special
THE SHORTVILLAGE PRIZE
Michela Miraglia then introduced Giorgia Bernoni, who had come from Rome  to assign personally the ShortVillage prize to the best Italian animated short film, according to ShortVillage.com (the city of short films). Giorgia handed over the prize to Marina Gigante, for the movie Women's Day, an amusing reproduction of a fancy world suddenly devoid of women. In this hypothetical world, men try to console themselves with female robots. These are useful for mechanical functions, but they are unable to imitate emotions and sensations that only real women can express. Where are real women? At last they are all relaxing in another planet, with waiter-robots that serve and worship them.
MARINA GIGANTE's prize awarding with GIORGIA BERNONI of SHORTVILLAGE
THE DIGITAL VIDEO - THE-TAB PRIZE
After the prize to the Milanese author, it was time for the third sponsor of the ceremony,  together with FlashGoddess and ShortVillage. Digital Video, producing Toonz and The-tab, as well as giving prizes to Istituto d'Arte Venturi and FlashAnimathon, had decided to select the best woman author for a copy of The-Tab 2.2. Digital Video team had chosen Carlotta Emmanuele with Anna.
The young artist from Lodi, interviewed by Michela Miraglia, confirmed that the most important thing in a short film is to have a strong idea and to be able to develop it. Anna is an elderly lady sitting on a bench in a park in autumn. From a leaf falling into her hand, she has the hint to re-think about her entire life, which materialises in front of her eyes, like a film in a film, until an elderly man takes her by the hand towards a still possible future.
CARLOTTA EMMANUELE's prize awarding and The-Tab
THE PRIZE AWARDING OF SHORT ANIMATED FILMS
It was late according to the schedule, so the prizes for the short films section were soon handed over. The first was the audience prize, which was assigned by the aniMOweb site visitors undisputedly to the movie Summer by Nicola Brusco. Like Daniela Marsino, the author from Verona had participated during the day and held a seminar. In order to catch the last train to Verona, he had already left. The movie by Nicola, one of the most amusing of section C, depicts a family in a paradoxical way with the style of cartoons. The summer heat leads the tensions in the family from a banal everyday situation to a tragic slaughter. If the massacre in the cartoon is funny, it makes also bitterly reflect upon what happened to many apparently ordinary families where the normal relationship between wives, husbands, children, mother-in-laws,father-in-laws and the generations can also lead to tragedy and idiocy. Reading the newspapers and watching television, one discovers that reality is sometimes much more unpredictable than fancy, as the same Nicola Brusco underlines in the final subtitles of his film.
The prize to NICOLA BRUSCO
The special mention of the jury went to the movie Hair by Jade Jossen. The author of Swiss origins had already won the first prize of aniMOweb with the movie But you can't go on without me by the group I Pulcini Gialli in the previous edition on the theme of environment pollution. This year she proposed a sarcastic film on women's hairs, carefully and unnaturally removed with lots of pain from the legs of models and actresses in advertising and cinema. Influenced by such examples emphasised by media, women are obliged to appear without hairs, while in reality they are not. The same author says we are surprised to see women with hairs, as if women were born and grew depilated.
The prize to JADE JOSSEN
It was then the time of the prize awarding to the foreign films, while their authors were absent. The film of the Russian Andrei Bakhurin Los dias sin dias had placed third, while Am I a Hero? of the Indonesian Dhanank Pambayun had placed second.
The film by the author from St. Petersburg had touched both the audience of Internet voters and the students of Istituto Venturi, who had crowded Sala Truffaut the previous day. A young girl remains with her love near an elderly person who is very sick. She helps him to eat and tries to keep him company. Then the girl gives way to frightening ghosts who seem to annoy the patient. The awakening from what seems to have been a nightmare shows that the elderly person is in fact a young boy, the ghosts are in fact the doctors who try to cure the patient, the only certainty common to the dream and to reality is the young girl, who has always been there. This moving story, which probably is autobiographical, was selected by the jury as a homage to young girls and women, who have always taken care of sick people, of children, of those who need help, much more than men.
The film by the Indonesian Dhanank Pambayun deals with a completely different theme. It is about women at work, who have to endure male rules and are treated as sexual objects, if not with sexual harassment. At home, the protagonist takes her revenge in a dream. She becomes a pugilist and is able to knock rabbit-men out. If men at work impose their rules, in family life women take their revenge, even if in this case only it is in a dream. This film has the merit to show how controversies between men and women exist and cannot easily overcome. This awareness on the part of women can be useful to fight against men's vexations due to gender differences.
The prize for the Indonesian film was received by Antonella Mazzoni, one of the collaborators of aniMOweb editorial staff and of the Council for Equal Opportunities. She deals with the administrative part of the contest and had worked with the jury the day before the prize awarding.
Liviana Messori also received a prize on behalf of absent authors. As executive manager of the Council for Equal Opportunities, she has worked a great deal to guarantee the success of the contest.
The prize to ANDREI BAKHURIN
The prize to DHANANK PAMBAYUN with ANTONELLA MAZZONI
It was time for the two Italian winners, as the absolute winner of the section of short films was not known yet. Luca Frattini's film Women Dancing With The Earth had placed third. The author from Tuscany had provided evidence for an extraordinary sensitivity and delicacy. Furthermore, the film had an unusual visionary quality: a woman- goblin, often changing colours and form, wanders collecting drops of colour in fantastic lands populated by the most strange creatures. The film ends with a bored earth which feeds upon the thousands of colours collected in a cruet by this female being. After colouring with these dyes, the earth ideally dances with all the women of the world.
To Michela Miraglia's question "If you were born a woman, what would you like to do?", the Tuscan author readily answered "I would work with animation anyway". It is hard to imagine a more appropriate answer.
LUCA FRATTINI's prize awarding
To receive the second prize of the jury, Giuliano Parodi e Massimiliano Grassini authors of the film Amazing Life were called onto the stage. The movie, with a well conceived cinematographic device, predicts the future life of a young woman. The setting is in the same room, it is only time that passes in a very rapid way: a little girl sitting beside a little boy becomes an adolescent, a woman and then a mother until her life is ruined by the abandonment of her partner and by the misfortunes of her children. If only she could go back to the old days by clicking on the button of a videorecorder... Many girls (and boys) would do so, to avoid unpleasant destinies. Since it is a cartoon, the protagonist presses the button and in a rapid rewind becomes a little child again. She tries to avoid the undesired future by interrupting her relationship with the little boy in a sudden way. It is a bitter film which does not give many hopes, but such situations between men and women are possible in reality.
GIULIANO PARODI and MASSIMILIANO GRASSINI's prize awarding
After midnight, it was time to award a prize to the best short film in the contest. The Florentine Mattia Francesco Laviosa of Cartobaleno was then proclaimed winner of € 1.500 with his elegant film set in the late 19th Century Si tu n' étais pas là. This film had been presented in preview at aniMOweb and had been appointed as one of the best by many people for the elegance of the animation, the perfect directing, the plot and the surprising end. It is about diversity and deals with female and male homosexuality. To avoid the stereotypes of the time, the main characters disguise themselves to meet people of the same sex. But the male and the female in the end meet, even if in an unexpected way, and experience a situation of equality.
This film, in a stylistic perfection that was certainly decisive for the jury, seems to present a reality where the meeting between a man and a woman is possible only by chance and at the same time depicts an hypothetical perfect being with deep intellectual capacities, which is able to love both men and women.
The positive hope of the eternal meeting between the male and the female in human living, even in the particular situation presented in the film, remains the main reason why the jury selected this beautiful movie.
MATTIA FRANCESCO LAVIOSA's prize awarding
THE CONCLUSION WITH FEDERICA NANNETTI AND THE OTHER MEMBERS OF THE JURY
After handing over all the prizes of the contest Michela Miraglia and Andrea Cavazzuti called the members of the jury onto the stage. Fabio Pin, Veronique Brossier, Giulia Balladore and Federica Nannetti (Dario Picciau had already arrived in Geneva) publicly expressed a positive opinion on their work and on the ceremony. Michela and Andrea said goodbye to everybody in the hope to see again all in a future edition of the contest, not at all given for granted. AniMOweb editorial staff then moved to Caffè Concerto to spend the rest of the night with some authors and members of the jury, who had "survived" after the long interesting day.
Conclusion
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