Pick your battles.

The flagship award for the video in which every craft — direction, image, edit, performance and idea — locks together into something unforgettable. This is the work the whole festival is measured against.

Eligibility: Open to all music videos completed within the last 24 months. All genres, all budgets, all countries.

Awarded to the director whose authorship is unmistakable — a video where every frame carries a point of view and the whole is unimaginable in anyone else's hands.

Eligibility: Submitted by or on behalf of the director. One director (or directing duo/collective) per entry.

For the cinematographer who turns light, movement and composition into the emotional engine of the video.

Eligibility: Credit the director of photography in the entry form. Excerpts may be requested for screening reels.

Honours the edit that gives a video its pulse — cuts that don't just follow the music but converse with it.

Eligibility: Credit the editor in the entry form.

For visual effects that expand what a music video can be — whether photoreal, painterly or gloriously artificial — in service of the idea, not instead of it.

Eligibility: Credit the VFX lead, studio or artist responsible.

Celebrates animated videos of every technique: 2D, 3D, stop motion, mixed media and forms that don't have names yet.

Eligibility: The video must be predominantly animated. Hybrid live-action entries belong in Best VFX.

For production design that creates a complete world — sets, costume, colour and texture composing a place the viewer can almost touch.

Eligibility: Credit the production designer / art director in the entry form.

Awarded to the on-screen artist or actor whose performance carries the video — charisma, vulnerability or menace that stays with you after the last frame.

Eligibility: Name the performer in the entry form. Both musicians and actors are eligible.

For the video built on an idea so sharp it would survive being retold badly at a party — and is executed so well it never has to be.

Eligibility: Open to all videos regardless of budget or technique.

Proof that imagination outranks money. For videos produced on minimal means that punch far above their budget.

Eligibility: Total production budget must not exceed €3,000. Budget declaration required in the entry form.

Spotlights a director's early body of work — a first, second or third video announcing a voice the industry should learn now.

Eligibility: The director must have released no more than three commissioned music videos before this entry.

A dedicated stage for videos created within film schools, art academies and universities.

Eligibility: Director must have been enrolled at the time of production. Proof of enrolment required upon selection.

For work that treats the music video as an open art form — videos that risk incoherence and win.

Eligibility: Open to all techniques and formats. Duration limits are treated generously here.

Because none of this exists without the music. Honours the outstanding song at the heart of a submitted video.

Eligibility: Automatically judged from the audio of the submitted video; no separate audio upload required.