Rukeli by Alessandro Rak, wins the Nastri d’Argento 2026 award for Best Animated Short Film.

This award comes close to the week dedicated to Roma culture, Roma and Sinti pride, and the fight against antigypsyism. For this reason, its meaning is even stronger for us.

RUKELI is not only an award-winning film. It is the result of a long, serious, shared journey, born from a process of research, memory, and crossing borders. A process that involved authors, educators, Chi rom e chi no, and the young people who took part in the workshop experience, Roma and non-Roma, in a path that led them to confront the deep roots of the Porrajmos, a history too often removed, too rarely told.

We are particularly proud of this recognition for another reason as well. RUKELI confirms that documentary cinema is not only a format, but a method, a gaze, and an ethics of work. It is a practice that can move across languages, break the boundaries between documentary, fiction, and animation, and generate works capable of holding together rigor, imagination, and truth.

As AntropicA, a company that has always worked with a strong documentary vocation, we deeply recognize ourselves in this way of making cinema. A cinema born from listening, research, and encounter, and precisely for this reason able to speak in an authentic, powerful, and necessary way.

The story of Johann Trollmann reminds us that memory is not a formal exercise. It is a tool for reading the present. For recognizing dehumanization when it returns. For opposing segregation, racism, persecution, and genocides. So that what happened may never happen again, not in Italy, not in Europe, not in Palestine, not anywhere else.

This award gives us strength. And it reminds us that continuing to tell true, uncomfortable, living stories is more necessary today than ever.