Beast International Film Festival 03 — 07 JUN 2026

Official Competition

Every year, exciting new short and medium-length films compete for the awards of Best Fiction (EASTWAVE), Best Documentary (EAST DOC), Best Animation (ANIMAEAST) and Best Experimental (experimentalEAST). 

The Official Competition presents works of emerging filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe, a pillar to the festival offer. With each edition, this competitive programme enriches BEAST IFF and its community, introducing new works, new faces through a diverse selection of style and form. From impressive visuals to candid portraits, the Official Competition gives perspective on the New East while being at the core of our festival.

Anima East

The animaEAST screenings always aim to showcase great films, works that embrace a wide variety of techniques and narratives, revealing originality through distinct and borderless ways.  This year, inspired by the festival’s theme, we have also sought out works that reflect on the many thematic “rooms” that make up a home: growing, dreaming, leaving, longing, discovering, and reconnecting. Come on in and make yourselves at home.

East Wave

In a moment of political, social and economic collapse, resistance proliferates across faces, gestures and bodies. In EASTWAVE 2026, the intimate converges with the absurd to give rise to narratives in which the everyday is shaped by struggle and endurance, but also dark humor and the surreal. Across the six films in competition, resistance surfaces through fragility, fear, exhaustion, frustration and disillusionment, not as signs of defeat, but as forces that, seen together, become subversive in their insistence on reimagining resistance as something irreducibly shared.

Experimental East

This year’s experimental selection asks who, or what, deserves to be looked at. A mother through her daughter’s eyes. The sea, memory, an AI in conversation with a man. Human nature and technology. Alienation. Across analog animation, AI imagery, collage – and through botany, folklore and magic – these films find intimacy, grief and strangeness in unexpected places. Beautiful, occasionally uncomfortable, and widening what cinema is allowed to be about.

East Doc

With an uncertain future ahead, we often find ourselves feeling disconnected from the world around us, overwhelmed by change and searching for ways to rebuild our sense of belonging. The films selected for the EAST DOC Competition for Short Documentaries gently explore this fragile relationship between people and their surroundings, the landscapes we inhabit, the memories they hold, and the quiet struggles to protect them. These stories move through nature, community, and inherited histories, where myths grow from the soil and everyday gestures become acts of care and resistance.