8KLO started as a single event in a single city. The format we're building toward is a full week, and it's built in three movements.
The week opens with the hackathon: pluridisciplinary teams, not just animators, but painters and sculptors working in stop-motion, illustrators building sets, musicians scoring the films, working together under a shared brief tied to mental health. What comes out of a few days of that kind of pressure is rarely polished. It's honest, and that's the point.
Midweek is given over to a different kind of encounter: first a speed-networking session and then a pitch day, where teams present their work directly to professionals from the film industry. It's where a project finds its funding.
The week closes with the festival: several days of screenings, debates, and exhibitions that give the work, and the process behind it, a public life. The films shown aren't limited to what came out of that week's hackathon. The program also makes room for student work and for wider public selections, all connected by the same throughline, animation that takes mental health seriously.
Running alongside the festival, an animation workshop opens the process up to a younger audience, giving children and teenagers a hands-on introduction to 2D animation as a way of expressing what's hard to put into words. Creation as a tool, not just a showcase.
Each stop on this journey also commissions a local artist to shape the visual identity of that edition. It's a small gesture with a real effect: every edition is rooted in the creative scene of the place that hosts it, rather than arriving as an import.
The ambition behind this format is to let it travel across different cultural regions of Europe, each with its own relationship to mental health, to creation, and to what can and can't be said out loud. Bringing the same format into contact with different cultures isn't just a logistical exercise, it's the point: watching how the same subject is handled differently from one place to another, and building a space for those differences to meet.
This is a horizon, not a schedule. Which places, which partners, and which order, is something we're building deliberately, in conversation with the schools, venues, and organizations who share this mission, not something we're announcing ahead of having it in hand.
The 2026 edition remains rooted in Belgium and its neighboring regions, and that's deliberate. We're building on solid ground before we build wide. The years ahead are about proving the traveling format works, one edition at a time, with the partners who are ready to build it with us. If you're a school, a venue, an institution, or a company that sees your own mission in this trajectory, this is the moment to talk.
