Death is Smoking My Cigars

A film-poem created for Counterclock Journal's 2023 Patchwork: Film x Poetry fellowship, featuring an original poem by Mackenzie Duan and animation by Evan Bode.

In a lush and lively forest lives a hedgehog. He is at once admired, respected and envied by the other animals. However, Hedgehog’s unwavering devotion to his home annoys and mystifies a quartet of insatiable beasts: a cunning fox, an angry wolf, a gluttonous bear and a muddy boar. Together, the haughty brutes march off towards Hedgehog’s home to see just what is so precious about this “castle, shiny and huge.” What they find amazes them and sparks a tense and prickly standoff.

Keny-atta

Inside the closet at seamstress Jacira's house, in an old orange coat, lives Teca, a curious little bookworm, and her pet mite, Tuti. When the old seamstress mistakenly takes Teca and Tuti in her coat while returning a book to the city library, Tuti, once again, had caused some trouble. Escaping with Teca's ribbon in its mouth, it disappears through the mazes of the library, setting up a grand adventure. In addition to stop-motion, the short film "A Library Tale" features other animation techniques such as digital 3D and 2D, several scenes in live action with real settings and characters.

A collage of images and voices of women poets that succeeds brilliantly, both as a tribute to the women whose words are borrowed and as an original videopoem.

Poems by some of the greatest writers of all time are brought to life through lyrical animation and readings by some of today’s most respected performers.

Voir le soleil se lever dans la lune

A young man opens the window of his attic room and discovers a lunar landscape which submerges him and threatens to imprison him in an eternal sheet of ice. He closes the window to escape this vision and hears from deep inside his soul the sound of a poem being sung.

An animated poem about the fleeting nature of happiness.

The experimental animated film Song of the Flies (El Canto de las Moscas), translates the desolation caused by the violence of the Colombian armed conflict through the poetic voice of Maria Mercedes Carranza (1945–2003) and the audiovisual dialogue between 9 Colombian women. In 24 places, as a transit over the course of a day (Morning, Day, Night) a map of terror is drawn where massacres took place in Colombia in the 1990s. Archival images, the artists’ personal memories and the use of loops and analogue materials bring to life the landscapes ravaged by violence and build a polyphony of memory and mourning, a universal song of pain.

La vita nuova

Un spectacle interrompu

Marcel, your mother is calling you

Animation inspired by the poem “The Infinite” by Giacomo Leopardi.

Groter dan je bent

Six poems written by six young prisoners animated to tell their stories, thoughts, fears and hopes.

Giovanni currently lives a dreary life of near non-stop work. At school, his peers ridicule him incessantly, and his employer at work is distant and cold. As his isolation from society becomes unbearable, he suddenly finds himself on a train heading far away from his miserable home. Accompanied by Campanella, an acquaintance from school, Giovanni embarks on a journey that will define the rest of his life.

Ego Sum Petrus

Rubén tries to describe the color blue as "The color of dreams, of art, of the ocean and of the firmament", thereby unleashing half a century of poetry.

Pour ne pas oublier l'invisible