SAS2018 is pleased to present a series of animation screenings and exhibitions that will be free and open to the public. Concordia’s premiere H110 cinema will play host to evening screenings thematically linked to THEN | NOW |NEXT with curators and filmmakers in attendance on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. Daytime screenings and exhibitions will take place at the De Seve cinema, and inside the EV building next door.
Wake Up! is a collection of international animated short films that feature and celebrate indigenous histories and cultures. These animations are from diverse geographical locations, from North to South America, and from Arctic regions to Africa, made by filmmakers and artists with indigenous backgrounds. By tracing histories and exploring memories, these films reflect on the world as it is NOW highlighting cultural identity, resilience, and telling stories for the future.
Alisi Telengut is a visual artist and an award-winning filmmaker and animator of the nation/tribe Telengut from Siberia. Now based in Montreal, she holds an MFA (2016) from Concordia University. Her recent works include Nutag - Homeland, a “surrealist requiem” for the Kalymk people, who were deported to Siberia during Stalin’s Soviet regime. Alisi’s films have received awards at Sarasota Film Festival, Stockholm Film Festival and the Montreal World Film Festival. In addition to being showcased at worldwide film venues and exhibitions such as Sundance, TIFF and the Edinburgh Film Festival, her animation and moving image artworks have also contributed to ethnographic and ethnocultural research archives.
Asinnajaq is a visual artist, curator, writer and urban Inuk. Having completed her BFA at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University (2015), she was recently a curatorial intern at the Concordia University FOFA Gallery. Asinnajaq co-founded the Tillitarniit festival, a celebration of Inuit culture and voices, and curated Channel 51: Igloolik, a retrospective of Isuma's 30 years of video and film production. She is the director of Three Thousand (2017) which recasts 100 years of archival footage from the Inuit Nunangat and recently won the Kent Monkman Award for Best Experimental Work at the imagiNATIVE media arts festival.
Crema Liminalis is a collection of films old, new and NEXT—each a unique truffle unearthed from the fertile soil of the island of Montréal. A journey through space, time and everything in-between, this screening is a celebration of the animated form and process, and of the city that has for decades been home to a network of unlikely connections, providing a breeding ground for creativity and innovation.
Astroplastique is Claire Blanchet, Fred Casia, Eva Cvijanovic, HyunJin Park, Parissa Mohit and Elise Simard - all of whom met through the corridors of the National Film Board of Canada in Montréal. This free-form collective is seeking to create a fertile ground for collaborative, animation-based work, and is always in search of new ways of telling stories. Astroplastique thrives from highlighting individual talents while putting special focus on community and taking care of each other. They have a long history of creating content for fiction and non-fiction, and enjoy adding a touch of magic to everyday life. Following in this path, Astroplastique is curious to explore virtual and augmented realities, emergent and interactive narratives and serial content.
“Behind every great man is a great woman,” so the saying goes. In this case it was Evelyn Lambart standing next to Norman McLaren, not behind him. An under-recognized collaborator of McLaren for 21 years, Lambart was a sterling animator in her own right. This instructive 64-minute compilation about Canada’s first woman animator, playfully contextualized by filmmaker Donald McWilliams, aims to set the record straight (as it really was THEN).
The screening will be followed by a conversation with Donald McWilliams, producer Maral Mohammadian, NFB title animator Mélanie Bouchard and one of McLaren’s most recent biographers, SAS president Nichola Dobson.
Donald McWilliams is a documentary filmmaker whose work makes use of both live-action and animation techniques. He was inspired to become a filmmaker after meeting Norman McLaren in 1968. McWilliams would later work with McLaren, and this led him to make two films about the acclaimed NFB animator: Creative Process: Norman McLaren (1990) and Norman McLaren: Animated Musician (2014). Having also met McLaren’s long-time collaborator, Evelyn Lambart, McWilliams happily agreed to make Eleven Moving Moments with Evelyn Lambart in 2017. The film gave him the opportunity to bring Lambart out of McLaren’s shadow and recognize her contribution to his success, while highlighting her own beautifully crafted animation.
Animate Turangalîla is three-screen animated projection originally created as a visual partner for a live performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie. Considered an iconoclastic masterpiece of 20th century music, the symphony combines a lush and exotic array of sounds and cultural influences including birdsong, Balanese gamelan music, post war pop culture, Sanskrit, and the myth of Tristan and Isolde. Messiaen, the composer, was a synaesthete. His work begs to be experienced both visually and aurally. This is the first time the work will be viewed in its entirety as a media installation.
Rose Bond, animator and media artist has been internationally recognized for her monumental, content-driven, animated installations. She will be presenting a conference paper in the Expanded Frames: Animating Space panel alongside Pedro Serrazina
How does the temporal function in the contemporary situation where everything is possible and we have seen it all?
How do you keep an audience watching or do you?
Animation creates continuous motion from discontinuous instants. The non-linearity of its production generates a freedom in the creation process, mechanically and artistically, which is subsequently reflected in the perception of time and space of the end product, distorting the chronology of time as Aristotle’s unified plot and Freytag’s pyramid lose their monopoly. This immersive projection features works by de Bruyn, Jafri, Hattler and Mike Hoolbloom.
In Fall 2017, Lindsay Montgomery and Cilia Sawadogo introduced a unique interdisciplinary collaborative class between Film Animation and Ceramics at Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts. The resulting production combines ceramic zoetropes powered by pottery wheels, enhanced by strobe light, creating the illusion of movement without a camera. The zoetropes will be on display in the Black Box.
is an intensive, interdisciplinary, open-themed workshop led by Cilia Sawadogo, Rose Bond and Pedro Serrazina for intermediate and advanced Film Animation and Fine Art students. Participants experiment, learn and innovate with the frame-by-frame moving image process using the concept of space as framework to explore inter-relation between the whole space of a frame, the space they inhabit and the space of the installation as well as their personal history with objective of pursuing expressions of personal identity. Combining self created animation footage and sculptural platforms; participants will produce site-specific interdisciplinary installations.
Moebius animación, a curatorial and critical project dedicated to Latin American experimental animation, presents a selection of 16 short films from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Mexico, and Puerto Rico, produced between 2007 and 2014 by independent filmmakers and artists. This compilation is the result of our effort to map out the artistic field of experimental animation and its intense dynamic during the last decade. We have defined trends in the technical, narrative, material, and sensorial/affective dimensions of the works. The films explore and reinterpret a variety of techniques —such as pixilation, stop-motion, drawing, film scratching, 3D, and animation with painting and metals—, as well as conventions in the use of space, sound and edition.
Moebius animación has been working on the dissemination and study of experimental animation since 2009. We have curated screenings for animation festivals in several countries, including the United States, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Romania, Poland, and France. We have also designed exhibitions, workshops, and other events related to experimental animation, and we work every day in making Latin American animation visible through our website, www.moebiusanimacion.com. Moebius animación members are: Lina X. Aguirre, Cecilia Traslaviña González and Juan Camilo González.
TYRUS is Pamela Tom’s tour-de-force documentary about 105-year old Guangzhou-born, L.A. based visual artist, Tyrus Wong and his breathtaking scope of work across multiple artistic mediums and his personal and professional journey navigating racial bigotry in 20th century America. Reaching back to 1919, nine-year old Tyrus and his father left their village and family in China. Tyrus’s incredible journey takes him from the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco where he is detained and interrogated, to earning a scholarship to Otis Art Institute. Tom’s film makes meticulous use of Tyrus Wong’s exquisite art, archival footage, illuminating interviews and commentary from Wong himself to document how his unique style, melding Chinese calligraphic and landscape influences with contemporary Western art, helped the Disney animated film, Bambi (1942) specifically, and early Hollywood in general establish their signature visual styles. Although his design work was crucial to the animated classic Bambi and over 100 live action movies including The Music Man, Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild Bunch, the name Tyrus Wong remains largely unknown – until now. Tyrus’s life weaves an extraordinary thread in the tapestry of the American experience. more info here
In this water-ink animated film Requiem for Romance, a modern-day couple’s secret love affair comes to a bittersweet end during an evening phone call. Cell phone static creates distance between them as they battle over details of their relationship. But the visuals of the film reveal something vastly different: a parallel narrative of their relationship set in an epic feudal landscape where family influence, cultural pressures and their lust for adventure makes more sense. In this dream-like short film, they fight to hold on to a love they cannot escape. It is often noted that Requiem for Romance advanced to the Shortlist stage for the Oscars race in 2013
The films will be presented by Requiem for Romance director Jonathan Ng, with a Q & A sessions following the screening.
is an award winning, multi-disciplinary animation filmmaker whose unique set of hand-made styles focus on merging themes of action, experience and fantasy. His last film Requiem for Romance, a water ink slice of life, has toured festivals around the world, winning Best Art Direction at Anima Mundi, while earning a badge from Vimeo Staff Picks and being presented to the major studios in California as part of the Animation Show of Shows. Having worked in the animation industry since 2004, his feature animation credits include The Little Prince, The Mummy 3, Spiderwick Chronicles, April & the Extraordinary World, and The Day of the Crows. Jonathan is also known for one of his earliest films, Asthma Tech, produced at the National Film Board of Canada, a semi-autobiographical tale recounting his experiences with childhood asthma and its relationship to him learning how to draw.
Concordia proudly presents a selection of 23 short films produced between 2012 and 2018 by students in the Film Animation BFA program. This beautiful compilation includes animated documentary, rotoscoping, stop-motion, traditional 2D animation, under-camera/direct animation techniques, and a variety of experimental/hybrid practices.
This one-hour bilingual screening session zooms in on the cultural politics of one of the most vibrant sectors of contemporary Indigenous media art production today, bringing together the works of established and emerging artists based in Quebec. The animated shorts to be screened include Christmas at Moose Factory (1971) by pioneer filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin, Diane Obomsawin’s Walk-in-the-Forest (2009), In Your Heart (2012) by animator Raymond Caplin, Konwennénhon Marion Delaronde’s Skátne Ronatehiaróntie: They Grow Together (2012), and Nutag-Homeland (2016) by Montreal-based Alisi Telengut (Telengut, Siberia). Animations created during the UQÀM and Concordia workshops that have been held in Montreal since 2010, in collaboration with the Wapikoni Mobile, will also be screened. Various invited artists will take part in the Q&A session that will follow the screening. Organized by Kester Dyer, Mélissa Gélinas and Isabelle St-Amand.
Kester Dyer is a PhD candidate in Film and Moving Image Studies at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. His dissertation examines expressions of intercultural tension through manifestations of the supernatural in the cinema of Québec. Kester was recipient of the Film Studies Association of Canada’s Gerald Pratley Award in 2014 and Student Writing Award in 2016. He also currently teaches in the Department of Humanities at Dawson College in Montreal. In addition to Indigenous and Québécois cinemas, his areas of interest include nationalism, postcolonial theory, Irish film, and genre theory.
Mélissa Gélinas received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Screen Arts and Cultures from the University of Michigan. In 2017, she was awarded a two-year fellowship by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to undertake postdoctoral research at Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Her current research examines the language and cultural politics of contemporary Indigenous media arts in relation to Indigenous resurgence in Canada. As a settler scholar, Mélissa’s research, teaching, and translation activities draw on Indigenous perspectives and participate in initiatives dedicated to the continued and renewed expression of Indigenous cultures.
Isabelle St-Amand is an Assistant Professor, QNS, in the Departments of French Studies & Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Queen’s University. Her research as a settler scholar focuses on Indigenous literary criticism in Québec and Canada. In 2013, after co-founding the international conference Revisioning the Americas through Indigenous Cinema, Dr. St-Amand co-founded a graduate summer institute on Indigenous literatures and film at CÉRIUM/Université de Montréal, for which she was co-responsible from 2013 to 2016. The English version of her book La crise d’Oka en récits: territoire, cinéma et littérature is forthcoming at the University of Manitoba Press in Spring 2018.
