María Cristina Pérez’s “Once in a Body” lands in Annecy’s Perspectives, fourth short

María Cristina Pérez is taking the long way to a simple idea. The Colombian animation talent behind the experimental short “Once in a Body” (“Una vez en un Cuerpo”) competed in the Annecy Animation Festival’s Perspectives sidebar, and her choice of theme is doing the heavy lifting: human connection.

This is her fourth short, and she dedicates it to her sister. In other words, this is not just a festival bid and a credit line. It is personal storytelling folded into a form that rewards experimentation, and the personal fuel shows up in what the story is trying to capture and why it matters.

Annecy matters because it is one of the world’s biggest shop windows for animation craft and ambition. The festival’s Perspectives sidebar, in particular, is where work that does not fit neatly into mainstream expectations tends to surface. For an emerging creator, getting selected there signals that the industry sees something specific: not just polish, but intent. When you place experimental shorts on a stage like that, you are effectively saying the audience is ready to meet the creator on their terms.

Pérez’s growing body of work centers on the same overriding theme: connection between people. That might sound like a soft, universally acceptable statement, but in practice it is a sharp creative constraint. If human connection is the overriding theme, everything else has to orbit it, from character dynamics to visual rhythm to the emotional arc of the piece. Experimental animation has room to play with form, but it still needs a reason. Here, the reason appears to be the lived texture of relationships, not just aesthetics.

The source frames “Once in a Body” as fiction rooted in real experiences, and that matters more than it sounds. In industries like animation and film, the conversation often gets stuck in two extremes: either you treat storytelling as pure art disconnected from lived reality, or you treat it as a documentary-like record. Pérez’s approach, as described, sits in the middle. She uses real experiences as raw material, then transforms them into fiction that can be shared at scale.

That middle lane has second-order effects for decision-makers and stakeholders in creative industries. Festival programming choices can influence what gets financed next, what studios prioritize, and what collaborators are willing to take a chance on. When a creator’s work is rooted in real experience and framed around human connection, it can widen the appeal beyond niche experimental audiences while still protecting the experimental core. That is a balancing act: broad enough to be seen, specific enough to be memorable.

There is also a quiet incentive structure beneath the craft. Emerging creators often need proof of concept in a world where time and capital are limited. A fourth short, competing at a major festival sidebar, is a tangible proof point. It suggests momentum, not a one-off. It implies that Pérez is building a recognizable voice and theme across multiple projects, which is exactly what producers, investors, and distributors look for when they bet on new talent.

And then there is the dedication to her sister. The source does not elaborate on the sister beyond that dedication, but the fact itself carries weight. Dedicating a project to someone close signals stakes that cannot be fully engineered. It also hints at why the theme is connection, not spectacle. Emotional specificity tends to travel further than generic emotion. For executives monitoring the creative pipeline, that can be a useful signal: audiences may not be able to name the technique, but they can feel when a story has a true center of gravity.

For peers in the animation and broader creative ecosystem, Pérez’s Annecy presence offers a practical takeaway. When human connection is the overriding theme, creators can use both experimentation and festival credibility to convert personal experience into work that the industry pays attention to. That is how a creator scales from promising to undeniable: not by chasing trends, but by repeatedly delivering a coherent point of view that audiences and programmers can rally behind.