From Sitges to the Oscars: Victoria Warmerdam Touches the Sky with 'I'm Not a Robot'

It all begins with an ordinary scene that suddenly ceases to be so; with a captcha, that is, a test that everyone has completed countless times before… but that, for some reason, now resists. In the background, the legendary song “Creep” by Radiohead plays, but covered in choir form by Scala & Kolacny Brothers… until it stops playing. Everything comes to a halt. And everything did stop.

In the same way, an awards ceremony that we thought would bring few surprises (no matter how many hopes we had pinned on it), suddenly invited us to one of those leaps into the unknown that, obviously, change everything. In the blink of an eye, your life (and ours, too) takes a sharp turn, and nothing is ever the same again.

Suddenly, Amy Poehler stepped onto the stage of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles and announced who would take home the Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. And there, in that moment, we all felt like we touched the sky in unison.

The triumph of I’m Not a Robot in that category brings joy not only to its director, Victoria Warmerdam, but also to the SITGES brand… because, indeed, a year earlier, that very director and that very work had already won us over at our Festival.

In the 56th edition, in 2023, this provocative and impactful piece about a woman who, on an ordinary day at the office, discovers she might be a robot, was part of the selection of 18 shorts in the Official Fantastic Competition Section. Among all of them, the Critics' Jury singled this one out to award it the Best Short Film of the SOFC…

… which put Victoria Warmerdam directly into the Oscars race.

Cut, leap, and voilà.

The Academy’s crowning of a genre piece is news our team always welcomes with open arms. After all, for more than half a century, one of our core missions has been to give greater visibility and recognition to those kinds of works that were once seen as curiosities intended for a rather niche audience.

How far away those times now seem. At this point, it fills us with pride to see that the bridges we built with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are now being crossed by artists who, using SITGES as their base camp, manage to climb all the way to the highest summit. Where absolutely everyone is watching.

Because when we open the submission process for films and repeatedly remind everyone that the works which win the Best Short Film Award in the SOFC or Anima’t categories are automatically placed in a privileged position in the Oscar campaign, this is exactly what we mean.

From Sitges to Los Angeles; from that Closing Ceremony held on October 14, 2023, to the Oscars Gala on March 2, 2025. It’s a long journey, but the reward is there—and it’s also within our reach. The triumph of Victoria Warmerdam and her I’m Not a Robot is also a triumph for genre cinema… and of course, for the number one festival in the world in this field.

Today we celebrate this great “Victory”… and all those still to come!