9th Festival of Animation Berlin 2026
This year’s Festival of Animation Berlin (FAB) will take place from October 8 to 11, showcasing the best international and regional animated films.
The festival focuses on short, artistic animation in all its forms—from traditional hand-drawn animation and stop motion to CGI, cross-media experiments, and 360° films.
Alongside the competition programme—which also includes the Pink Panda programmes for children of different age groups—audiences can look forward to an exciting programme of events. Complementing the competitions, it offers a wide range of formats for industry professionals, families, and the curious: the Berlin Animation Hub serves as a meeting place for workshops, meet-the-expert sessions, and industry dialogue, featuring numerous workshops, talks, panels, masterclasses, and networking events that foster exchange and discussion. The exhibition FAB Dimensional – Animation Expanded also brings animation art beyond the cinema, outside the clearly defined and familiar framework of linear film, exploring its intersections with sculpture, games, and installation art.
Programme-Highlights
October 10 / 11 am until 6 pm / Admission free
Screening: Framebreakers (Animated fulldome films)
The films in this programme lead into dark forests, remote villages and communities where nature, tradition and superstition collide. At times archaic and sinister, at others absurd and darkly humorous, they reveal a world in which ancient myths suddenly come alive.
October 10 / 10:30 pm until midnight / Tickets 10/8,50€
Screening: It´s probably nothing
Horror Special II: Body Horror (Animierte Horror-Kurzfilme)
This programme explores body horror through experiences of losing control, the pressure to conform and the imposition of outside forces. Across psychotic inner worlds, grotesque metamorphoses and extraterrestrial interventions, the body becomes a vulnerable site upon which social expectations, violence and personal identity are negotiated. Poetic imagery meets disturbing depths, surreal experimentation collides with black humour, and a koala encounters an animator whose intentions appear distinctly questionable. Together, the films ask who our bodies truly belong to – and what happens when they suddenly begin to take on a life of their own. A programme about the unease of inhabiting one’s own body, and the unexpected forms that self-acceptance can take. Content waning: One of the films makes meaningful use of AI as an integral part of its artistic concept.
October 9 / 9:30 until 10:45 am / Tickets 10/8,50€
Screening: Pink Panda II Teens Competition
The Pink Panda competition offers carefully curated, age-appropriate programs for children and families. Programme #2 is designed especially for teenagers.
October 10+11 / 3 until 6 pm / free to participate
Activity: Aus Rotation wird Animation
Praxinoscope Hands-On Station
Among the oldest forms of animation are the rotating praxinoscope and the zoetrope. In a deceptively simple way, they make visible how animation actually works. Presented are praxinoscopes with animated loops. This year, the loops for the exhibition were created during workshops by pupils from the Primo Levi Gymnasium (Berlin-Weissensee), students from the animation class at the Kunsthochschule Kassel, and students in the “Screen Based Media” programme at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik (BHT). At the hands-on station, children and adults can carry out their own experiments with the medium of animation. The station is supervised by the Argentine animator and director Dante Zaballa and the American animation artist Lynn Tomlinson. Dante is known for his colourful, psychedelic visual worlds and his experimental frame-by-frame animation; Lynn is presenting her immersive installation Seasons Lament in the FAB Dimensional and her film A Black Rail’s Tale.
Detailed information about the festival’s full programme can be found here.
Thursday, October 8 until Sunday, October 11
Whole site
October 8: 7–10 pm
October 9: 11 am–10 pm
October 10+11: 11 am–midnight
Tickets