Cristal

A Long Goodbye, a Belgian-Luxembourgish-Dutch virtual-reality production, has won the Cristal for Best Immersive Work at this year's Annecy International Animation Film Festival. The award adds to a growing list of honours for the project, which previously received an award at the Venice Film Festival in 2025.[1]

Created by Kate Voet and Victor Maes, the interactive animated experience places the viewer in the world of Ida, an elderly pianist living with dementia. Through her surroundings and fragments of her past, the work explores how memory loss affects both those experiencing it and the people closest to them.[1]

The production was a cross-border collaboration. Belgium's Cassette for Timescapes led, with co-production by Tarantula Luxembourg and Valk Productions in the Netherlands. Luxembourg studio Velvet Flare was among the studios involved in bringing the immersive experience to life. The result is a VR work that uses animation not as spectacle but as a way to inhabit someone else's fading mind.[1]

Annecy is the world's oldest and largest animation film festival, and its Immersive section is one of the most competitive. A Cristal is not a minor award. For Luxembourg's animation and VR sector, which has built a quiet but consistent reputation over the past decade, it is further evidence that the investment in creative industries is producing work that competes at the highest international level.

Dementia affects an estimated 55 million people worldwide. A VR experience will not cure it. But putting someone inside the fragmented perspective of a person losing their memories is a use of technology that does something journalism and statistics cannot: it makes the abstraction personal. That is what A Long Goodbye does, and that is likely why Annecy recognised it.[2]