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Animation Festival Announces Industry Marketplace and Talent Residency

Annecy International Animation Festival Unveils Expanded MIFA Industry Marketplace and Global Talent Residency for 2026 Edition

Annecy, France – 24 November 2025 The Annecy International Animation Film Festival today announced the formal launch of MIFA XR Market & Residency, a 12-month industry accelerator that fuses the festival’s 40-year-old trading platform with a rolling talent residency beginning 1 March 2026. The initiative, revealed during the festival’s final accounting press conference, is designed to convert Annecy’s June deal-making spike into a continuous development pipeline for features, series and immersive projects.

“Annecy 2025 proved that animation is no longer a niche—it is the dominant global storytelling language,” said Mickaël Marin, CEO of festival organizer CITIA. “With 18,200 delegates from 118 countries and MIFA booths sold out in 48 hours, we are obligated to extend the calendar and give creators physical space, not just five days of hallway meetings.”

According to the 2025 post-festival report released 20 June, the MIFA floor hosted 6,550 accredited professionals, 196 stands and 1,300 scheduled pitch meetings that generated a disclosed project value of €387 million, a 31 % increase over 2024.

The same study shows that independents accounted for 62 % of all pitches, yet only 19 % secured production financing—an efficiency gap the new residency is engineered to close.

The MIFA XR Market & Residency will occupy the under-construction Cité internationale du cinéma d’animation, a 9,000 m² creative campus opening in January 2026 on the shores of Lake Annecy. Twenty-five residents—selected through an open call that begins 15 December—will receive €20,000 cash, housing, studio desks and mentoring from Netflix, BBC Children’s, NHK, Canal+, and Illumination. Projects may be at concept, pilot or work-in-progress stage; immersive and hybrid formats are explicitly encouraged.

“Our data indicate that projects backed by at least one regional fund and one streamer pre-sale have an 84 % completion rate versus 46 % for those without,” Marin noted, citing a March 2025 European Audiovisual Observatory report.
“The residency integrates those partners on day one, eliminating the financing lottery that plagues young talent.”

The accelerator will run two tracks: Feature & Series (18 residents) and XR & Games (7 residents). Each track culminates in a non-public “green-light corridor” held during Annecy 2026, where residents pitch directly to commissioning editors closed to the general MIFA crowd. Organizers have guaranteed a minimum of five official co-production treaties—covering Canada, South Korea, South Africa, Ireland and France—to be countersigned on site, ensuring residents leave with actionable next steps rather than handshake promises.

Women-in-animation advocacy group Women in Animation will administer a parallel Leadership Lab inside the residency, repeating the model piloted at Annecy 2025 that raised female director attachment rates from 28 % to 44 % in one year.

Additional labs focused on Latin American and African talent will rotate quarterly, aligning with Unesco’s 2026 “Year of African Animation” declaration.

Beyond project incubation, the marketplace footprint will triple. A new MIFA Digital Pavilion will host 60 VR stations, real-time motion-capture demos and an AI-assisted storyboard clinic developed with France’s National Centre for Cinema (CNC). Entry to the pavilion is capped to 1,000 industry badges per day to preserve curated networking, a lesson drawn from 2025’s overcrowded VR lineups.

Local economic impact projections commissioned by the Haute-Savoie department forecast the residency and expanded market will add €55 million in annual direct spend and create 220 full-time equivalent jobs in the region by 2028. The same study predicts a 17 % year-over-year rise in international productions shooting or post-producing in France’s Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes cluster.

Applications for the MIFA XR Market & Residency open online 15 December 2025 at www.annecyfestival.com. Selections will be announced 15 February 2026, with the first cohort arriving in Annecy on 1 March.

About CITIA

Created in 1960, CITIA is the economic development agency for France’s animation and digital media sectors. It organizes the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and MIFA, publishes the trade magazine Animation Journal, and operates the Cité internationale du cinéma d’animation, set to open in 2026.