Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope

International symposium on documentary animation, presented with UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and the University of Applied Arts Vienna

Ecstatic Truth returns for its tenth edition with a two-day gathering of artists, filmmakers and researchers exploring documentary animation in its most expanded form.

The symposium takes its name from Werner Herzog’s idea of ecstatic truth — a form of truth that exceeds the merely factual. Animation is uniquely positioned to work in this register. It can render memories, dreams, inner states and dispersed timescales, showing aspects of reality inaccessible to live-action cinema while openly acknowledging its artifice.

Our 2026 theme, Animating Hope, asks what documentary animation can do in a moment saturated with information, simulation and uncertainty. Rather than adding to the noise, can animation transform data into meaning and experience into understanding?

The symposium includes presentations, screenings and discussions addressing speculative futures, resistance, memory, and new documentary forms emerging across installation, performance and hybrid cinema.

Presented in association with UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

About Ecstatic Truth

Ecstatic Truth is an annual symposium on animated documentary founded in 2016 that explores issues arising from the interface between notions of animation and of documentary (conceptualised very broadly as non-fiction), with a particular interest in questions raised by experimental and practitioner perspectives.

This year, we are in collaboration with Holger Lang and his UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and University of Applied Arts, Vienna and are open to proposals for future collaboration with other organisations.

Contact: ecstatic.truth.symposium@gmail.com

Ecstatic Truth collective:

Birgitta Hosea, Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham;
Pedro Serrazina, Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa;
Tereza Stehliková, University of Creative Communication (VŠKK), Prague;
Natalie Woolf, Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa.