There is no explicit theme each year, as the festival is made up of very diverse entries from all around the world each year. However, this time the organizers communicated to me that was that this edition has an accent on the women in animation, from the fact that a workshop was held for the first time targeting women auteurs (following a study that showed that a far minority of female animation students go further on to actually making films compared to their male counterparts.), and that the judges for the animation competitions were a full-women line-up. 

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The organizers also felt like this edition is a "coming home" edition- after having suffered a massive scaling-down in the previous edition because of the pandemic. With this in mind, I created the character of a female air traffic controller that is in an active, leading position, welcoming the Animest sheep, their mascot, back home. 

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Personally, I am tired of images of women in passive, lethargic expressions, drawn in poses in which only their aesthetics is the point of interest. So I was happy that I had the opportunity to showcase a female character that is in high-energy, that is interesting to look at because of what she is doing, not because of how she looks.