Flóra Anna Buda’s ’27’ Tops Live-Action Competition To Take Cannes’ Short Film Palme d’Or

The 2023 Cannes Film Festival wrapped over the weekend, and Flóra Anna Buda’s 27 won the festival’s Palme d’Or for a short film. It’s the first animated short to win the award since Waves ’98 did so in 2015.

We spoke with Anna Buda before Cannes for the release of the 27 trailer. Explaining where the idea for the film came from, she told us, “I was wondering, if I would direct a porn film, how could I cheat a little social sensitivity in the plot?”

In 27, the film’s protagonist Alice is celebrating her 27th birthday. An adult by almost any measure, she is suffocating a bit as she still lives with her parents and nosey younger brother. Feeling stuck, she regularly disappears into her dreams to escape her dreary everyday life. After a psychedelic party on a factory roof, she is involved in a serious drunken bike accident. But will a brush with death be enough for her to take control of her life?

Buda is an animation film direction graduate of the prestigious Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME) in Budapest. This is Anna Buda’s second short to impress at a major festival. Her previous film, Entropia, won the Teddy for best short film and was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlinale 2019, and later scored a special mention at GLAS in 2020.