Below is the jury statement:

“Rukeli tells the story of an extermination, of an oppression that was organised and prolonged over time, through a boxing story. It does so through a personal act of redemption: a small, stubborn form of resistance that brings back before the audience the forgotten fame of a boxer, a glimmer amid all the filth left behind by the twentieth century.

Rukeli is the story of a German and ‘Gypsy’ boxer, a light heavyweight whose talent offended the Reich and who, for this reason, was first excluded from so-called Aryan society and then reduced to a featherweight, to a man weighing no more than a child, like all the others inside the extermination camp.

The group of young people from Naples who worked on this short film to speak about the Sinti community had a brilliant idea: to bring boxing and animation together. To speak about the Sinti to those who know them, but above all to those who see them only from a distance, while driving past, hoping that the warm summer wind will not carry their smell. A story of strength, harmony and beauty unfolding through the flow of animated frames.

Starting from historical accounts of the Sinti boxer Johann Trollmann, known as Rukeli, who lived in Germany during the Nazi era, the young filmmakers selected, created and altered both real and fictional images. They gave form and cohesion to this fragmented material, inventing and writing a first-person narrative. We hear Rukeli’s own voice as, against the backdrop of an effective video montage, he tells us his story of sport, victories and imprisonment.

Historical truth, however, is merely a starting point and matters only up to a certain extent. The short film reworks, invents and evokes a character through whom the Sinti community speaks: of having been humiliated, but also of being alive, present, ready to make itself heard and to live fully.

We listen to the boxer’s account over a montage that is at once frantic and harmonious, in which black and white, and particularly the painterly filter that blurs everything, do not simply give all the images the same visual texture. Instead, they shield our gaze and transform photographs resembling archival footage into undefined, stylised sketches, so that the scenes we see come to resemble Rukeli’s rough, imperfect voice, marked by a strong Sinti accent, as he recalls his story.

We can no longer rely on our eyes alone. We must participate, listen and use our imagination, guided by the boxer’s voice, in order to make his story exist within the cinema.

Rukeli conveys, clearly and powerfully, what exclusion and marginalisation mean, as well as the desire to live and to be recognised without being diminished. It does so without showing these things directly through images. It tells us what happened during the Nazi era and what continues to happen today, through the trust we place in a story rather than through the ambiguous objectivity of archival photographs.

For these reasons, the Animatica jury has selected Rukeli as the best short film in competition in the Animation Section of the 2026 CortoCircuito Film Festival.”

Follow the latest news about Rukeli and its upcoming screenings at antropica.org.