Works by ECU Animation Artists and Curators Appear at Festivals Across Canada
Still from Cameron Kletke’s 2024 film Not Enough Womb for the Two of Us. (Image courtesy National Film Board of Canada)
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Films and programs by ECU students, faculty members and alums are making the rounds at the country’s most celebrated film events.
Emily Carr University of Art + Design (ECU) students, faculty members and alums have films and programs appearing at animation festivals nationwide this season.
Artist, ECU faculty member and Assistant Dean of 2D + Experimental Animation and 3D Computer Animation Adriana Jaroszewicz says the consistent presence of these artists on the festival circuit underscores the uniqueness of ECU’s animation community.
“Our community’s award-winning appearances at these celebrated events, year after year, is a testament not only to their dedication and brilliance but to the creative, hands-on learning environment we aim to foster at ECU,” she says. “The enthusiastic response of audiences is likewise evidence of animation’s enduring value as an artistic medium. I’m incredibly proud of our students, staff, faculty and alums, and I am honoured to have the opportunity to help shape how we deliver our world-class programming at ECU.”
This year, media scholar and ECU faculty member Alla Gadassik once again presented a curated program at the prestigious Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF). The program, titled Threads and Fibres, explored the use of textiles by film artists.
“From the soft and pliable qualities of fabric to techniques like embroidery and quilting, textiles have inspired animators for over a century,” Alla writes. “Working with materials like cotton, wool and polyester, artists featured in this special screening embrace textiles as a layered and tactile medium. Their films use fabric to fashion textured worlds, animate compositions inspired by textile patterns and explore the cultural politics of clothing.”
Threads and Fibres began with a short talk and audience discussion and featured films including filmmaker and ECU faculty member Lindsay McIntyre’s 2020 experimental short, seeing her.
“Shot on hand-processed Super 16 film, the work invites a witnessing of the labour, skill and familial record held within beadwork passed down from mother to daughter through generations,” reads a post by Lindsay and the Baltimore Museum of Art, where the film is screening through Dec. 1 as part of the museum’s Preoccupied: Indigenizing the Museum initiative.
Threads and Fibres represents a return to OIAF for Alla, who in 2023 curated a film program alongside a curatorial essay on the theme of animating ink, as well as serving on the OIAF’s international jury.
Meanwhile, Happiness, the 2024 grad film by animation storyteller and artist Nil Yurdakul (BMA 2024), was screened in OIAF’s Canadian Student Competition. And Cameron Kletke’s (BMA 2023) experimental short Not Enough Womb for the Two of Us, which debuted earlier this year via the National Film Board’s celebrated Hothouse program, appeared in OIAF’s Canadian Panorama program.
ECU community members have a history of award-winning appearances at OIAF, with student films by artists including Cameron Kletke, Kunsang Kyirong (BMA 2020) and Ivan Li (BMA 2019) winning the Canadian Student Competition in recent years. In 2022, lauded filmmakers Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis took home the OIAF’s award for Best Canadian Animation for their critically acclaimed Flying Sailor, which also won Best Animated Short Film at the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF) and is one of three films for which the artists have received an Academy Award nomination.
Closer to home, Heron Cheung’s (BMA 2024) grad film In Vain was selected to screen virtually at the Vancouver Asian Film Festival (VAFF). And current fourth-year 2D + Experimental Animation student Hannah Sy’s third-year short Coastal Community Centre’s Fluffy Friend will also appear in VAFF’s virtual program, following its Sept. 21 screening at CIFF.
