Pond life - Jeffrey Langille
HD | Color | 2023 | 2min 51s| Stereo | Canada

When I was a kid, I had a microscope. My father was teaching high school at the time and brought home microscope slides from the science room. I spent entire afternoons looking at protozoa, housefly wings, insect legs, human hair, etc. In this video, I put the experience to music.

Jeffrey Langille began filmmaking in the 1990s using super-8, editing film by hand on his kitchen table. His practice has retained this connection to materiality, including work with tape loops, analog synthesizers, and 16 mm film. His areas of interest include landscape, poetic language, experimental electronic music, noise music, field recording, and photography. He attended film school in the 1990s, and completed an MFA at Simon Fraser University in 2015.
His work has been exhibited in Canada and internationally and has received support from SFU’s School for the Contemporary Arts, the BC Arts Council, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the Yukon Advanced Artist Award, the Yukon Permanent Art Collection, the Yukon Prize (finalist 2023), and the Canada Council for the Arts. After many years in Vancouver, he now lives on the traditional territory of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in First Nation, in Dawson City.

Necktie Cinema - John Akre
Digital | Color | 2023 | 4min 06s | Stereo | USA

What if neckties stopped trying to strangle us and showed us their movies instead? I've never been one to wear neckties, but I was inspired by the film, "The Grand Bizarre" by Jodie Mack to animate them. Ryan Udairam created a score to give those ties drama and suspense.

John Akre is an animator who lives in Louisville, KY.

Ghariba & Ajeeb - Boubaker Boukhari
Digital | Color | 2023 | 7min 17s | Stereo | United Arab Emirates

In this story, the girl Ghariba embarks on a journey to find her friend Ajeeb and to find a way to cross a river guarded by a crocodile.

Boubaker Boukhari, a native of Algeria, currently resides in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He pursued higher education in the fine arts field and received training from traditional jewelry artisans in the history and techniques of jewelry making. In addition to this, he also works as a director and animator.

Gimlet - Ruth Hayes
Film to Digital | Color | 2023 | 4min 4s | Stereo | USA

A phytogram cocktail made with three varieties of basil.

Ruth Hayes animates in film, video, flipbooks and other precinema devices, experimenting with form and content while exploring visual phenomena, engaging in political critique, and mining personal experience. She learned to animate at Harvard, earned her MFA in Experimental Animation from California Institute of the Arts, and taught animation in the interdisciplinary curriculum of The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington for 25 years, retiring with emerita status in 2021.

Beyond - Raquei Salvatella de Prada
HD | Color | 2024 | 3min 10s | Stereo | USA

Beyond addresses, in animated form, the history of Taiwan's White Terror, possibly the darkest period in Taiwan.

Raquel Salvatella de Prada is an artist and educator who focuses on integrating computer animation and motion design with different traditional art forms by collaborating with artists of diverse backgrounds such as printmaking, painting, installation art, poetry, puppetry, theater, and musical performance. She finds that the combination of her digital medium with physical visual media can be a powerful way to communicate social issues. Her experimental animation work and her collaborative performance pieces have been featured at festivals and on stages across the country and internationally.

Les Bétes - Michael Granberry
Digital | B/W | 2024 | 11min 38s | Stereo | USA

A mysterious rabbit with a set of magic keys summons a host of strange creatures to entertain a wicked king and his decadent court in this dark stop-motion animated fantasy inspired by the works of Ladislas Starevich.

Michael Granberry is a 3-time Emmy award-winning director and stop-motion animator whose work can be seen in the critically acclaimed series "Severance" directed by Ben Stiller, the Oscar-winning "Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio", Henry Selick's "Wendell & Wild", Charlie Kaufman's Oscar-nominated "Anomalisa", "Tales of Halloween", "Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy" and numerous other feature films, documentaries, TV shows, web series and music videos. His independent work, which he describes as "queer, garage-punk stop-motion slam poetry" uses recycled and repurposed materials to create strikingly unique visual stories.