When you hear the word Cannes, the first image is usually the red carpet. But the festival city is also a restless organism of markets, side programmes, small screens, late conversations and independent projects that still believe in the stubborn magic of an image.
The other Cannes
The Power of Persuasion, the animated project by Ernst Weber and Pavel “Pasha” Shapiro, belongs to that second Cannes: less ceremonial, more human and often more interesting.
In the open results of World Film Festival in Cannes — Remember the Future, the film is listed as a March 2026 winner in the Best Animation Film category. That is distinct from the main competition of the Festival de Cannes, and the distinction matters. It does not, however, make the independent circuit culturally insignificant.
A frame as a building
Look at an animated frame like an architect. Where is the centre? Where does the eye move? What presses on the character? Where is the air? Where is the light? A good frame has depth, proportion, balance, pressure and a route for the eye.
The ITFS 2026 film list identifies The Power of Persuasion as a 2025 U.S. animated short directed by Ernst Weber and Pasha Shapiro, produced by Pasha Shapiro, with a running time of 12 minutes and 30 seconds.
The power of persuasion
Animation persuades us to believe in a created person, an artificial world and a movement that never existed. Architecture does something related: a strong space can persuade us to slow down, stop near a window, feel height, anxiety, solemnity or calm.
A long visual path
Pavel “Pasha” Shapiro’s biography gives the story a wider artistic line: academic art education in Leningrad, television graphics in St Petersburg, motion design, music video, new media and animation. The continuity matters. Classical visual training does not disappear in the digital age; it mutates into new media.
Small film, large labour
Short animation is deceptive. Behind a few minutes are characters, environments, models, light tests, textures, sound, edits and revisions. In that sense, an animated film resembles an architectural project: idea, sketch, structure, adjustment — then the completed world.