Out of more than 250 films submitted through the Warsaw Glitch 2026 open call, over 150 were animated works. Animation became not only the largest part of the open-submission competition, but arguably its strongest, most diverse and most creatively exciting field. One winner cannot represent that whole spectrum, so this montage shows the films that defined the Ground Zero Edition: from painterly existential cinema and magical realism to environmental allegories, fantasy worlds, war stories and entirely original universes.

Congratulations to every filmmaker who submitted animated work to Warsaw Glitch 2026. This was the most fiercely competitive and creatively rich field of the entire Ground Zero Edition, and this montage is for all of them.

This year's Best Music Video category gave the jury one of the hardest decisions of the entire competition. The work was almost impossible to compare directly: opera and visual poetry, punk rock, metal, psychedelic trips, animation, club culture and dystopian narrative films, made with everything from a single generative model to complex multi-model workflows and hybrid productions that combine AI with traditional filmmaking. Rather than force three radically different works into first, second and third place, the jury chose three winners ex aequo: three films, three completely different styles, three different musical worlds.

Three films that could hardly be more different, which is exactly why choosing between them made so little sense. This year's submissions showed how wide the language of the contemporary music video can become when filmmakers experiment with new tools, new aesthetics and completely different forms of storytelling.

More dystopian science-fiction nightmare than traditional horror, Black Harvest is the second spin-off set in the Embryom universe, an original narrative IP created by Giulio Fulchignoni, an Italian filmmaker blending artificial intelligence with cinematic storytelling. A lone Raider crosses a landscape of industrial decay and living horror in search of Mireblood, a rare substance harvested from the poisoned lands. The jury recognised its uncompromising world-building, disturbing atmosphere and striking visual language, with a strong influence from the paintings of Zdzisław Beksiński.

Sometimes less is more. In cinema the quietest films can carry the greatest emotional weight, where a subtle breath, a distant sound or the absence of music says more than a full score. This year's Best Sound, powered by ElevenLabs, recognised films that used sound not as decoration but as an essential part of storytelling, shaping tension, atmosphere, rhythm and emotion with precision.

Rainy Day is difficult to classify by design: part psychological thriller, part experimental horror, part anime and part surreal descent into a fractured reality. The jury recognised its distinctive visual language, unsettling atmosphere and willingness to experiment with genre, sound and narrative structure. For a student production it showed a bold creative identity and a strong understanding of how image, silence, tension and ambiguity work together. Two honorable mentions went to first-time AI filmmakers who combined generative tools with traditional CGI, which is exactly what the student category should encourage: experimentation, learning across disciplines and the confidence to develop an individual visual language.

Commercial filmmaking is often where new visual tools are tested fastest, but technology alone does not make an advertisement memorable. The strongest work still comes down to a clear idea, a distinctive visual language and the ability to make a product or a message feel cinematic. This year's Best Commercial brought together three very different approaches to that challenge.

People often say that AI is punk rock. If one category at Warsaw Glitch proved the point, it was Online Vertical. We expected microdramas, advertising experiments and polished, scroll-friendly stories built for the vertical screen. Instead the category mutated into something far stranger: punk, psychedelic, urban, experimental and occasionally completely unhinged. And somehow, the further east we went, the darker it got.

The tools may be shared. The story should not be. When You Run From Your Mom, directed by Edmond Yang from Norway, is based on his own experience of growing up as a multicultural kid in the suburbs of Oslo and on an op-ed he published in the Norwegian newspaper VG. It turns lived experience into a deeply personal, beautifully animated story, and it resonated with judges from across the world precisely because it feels unmistakably authored. As generative tools become available to everyone, authorship becomes more important, not less. Give a hundred creators the same models, software and technical possibilities, and the films that matter are the ones where you can still immediately feel: this story belongs to this filmmaker and no one else.

Tell us something you know. Something you lived, imagined, feared, loved or understood in a way nobody else could. Use AI to extend your artistic voice, not to replace it with generic generations. Congratulations to all the writers and filmmakers recognized in this category. Different tools can generate images. Only you can decide what is worth saying.

Hard Dayzzz, directed by Max De Donato and produced by Nation Studio (France), follows a fly thrown into a series of increasingly hostile trials, turning a tiny and often ignored creature into the protagonist of a surprisingly cinematic journey. The award was given for the film's inventiveness in storytelling and editing, particularly its use of point of view, rhythm, sound and visual transitions to build a coherent narrative around a single protagonist. By connecting image, movement, sound and perspective through one clear idea, the film transforms the experience of a fly into a short-form fable about persistence, instinct and the simple joy of staying in motion. What made it stand out was not only the concept itself, but the way the editing holds that concept together, making the audience experience the world from an unusual point of view and turning a very small protagonist into the emotional center of the film.

Congratulations to all recognized filmmakers for showing how editing can become much more than assembly: it can define perspective, emotion and the entire logic of a film.

Fashion film sits somewhere between cinema, design, performance and visual culture. The strongest works do more than present clothes: they build an atmosphere, a point of view and a world around them. This year's Best Fashion Video category brought together three very different approaches to fashion storytelling, from raw underground energy to handcrafted visual imagination and more conceptual explorations of image and identity.

Congratulations to Ock Jae-kyung, Lucile Lebreton and Jonathan Carene on their recognition in the Best Fashion Video category at the Ground Zero Edition.