
14/09/2025
One more 🏆 for our short film The Rabbit is Dead! Thank you Korça Short Film Festival!
Jury Statement (Umut Can Türkmen, Jakov Poposki, Blerim Gjinovci):
In a program filled with emotional and personal stories that leave a lasting mark on the collective consciousness, we decided to award the prize for Best Film in the National Competition to The Rabbit is Dead, directed by Hanis Bagashov from North Macedonia.
With mature and precise direction, worthy of contemporary European cinema, the film enables the actors’ freedom and expression, capturing a character caught between her own creative drive and her personal struggle for freedom.
The film’s narrative drive—what we believe to be an autobiographical confession of the author’s moments of writer’s block—is playfully yet precisely broken and enriched through the shattering of the wall of reality. This breach of reality is cleverly employed so that, through comic relief, the audience is invited into an even deeper introspection, gaining insight into the protagonist’s true need, the notion of free will.