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.

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

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.

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.

A spring night is a poetic film which is based on the motives of the poem by V. Lugovsky. The film is devoted to the theme of fidelity to the battle traditions of revolutionary past, to the theme of human happiness the sense of it in the battle for high ideals.

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.

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.

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

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.

An evocative animated film on the life and works of the great Kyrgyz poet Alykul Osmonov.

Un spectacle interrompu

Five different exploits of Sinbad the sailor where he gets mixed up with the pretty daughters of exotic potentates, with powerful monsters that threaten his existence, and with all sorts of teeming jungle life.

Réne Manzor's debut short, a surreal story about a tramp trying to build a road through the desert.

Loose impressionistic brushstrokes sketch a series of portraits of two faces, one male and one female, while the verse on the soundtrack tells the tale of both one and a thousand relationships.

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.

At the age of 9, I stopped speaking. It's the year I broke from the inside, raped. I came out as a trans boy years later. I am often afraid of becoming a man who I might confuse for the one who hounded my body. This film is a poem, this film is about growing into the unknown.

Based on the novel ‘Wilted Flower’ by Nou Hach, the film unfolds a gripping tale of grief and desperate hope. When Noun, the mother, breaks off her daughter's engagement to a struggling suitor in favor of a wealthier match, tragedy ensues. As her daughter's heartbreak consumes her, illness tightens its grip, pushing Noun to turn to ancient rituals for salvation.

The third film of the biographical cycle based on Pushkin's drawings and texts.

In a realm beyond the senses, plants interact with surreal cinematography to chart the course of our character: an entity said to embody the life and work of Felisberto Hernández, Uruguayan father of magical realism. Through this journey, we are confronted with an open-ended experience questioning the nature of musicality versus cinematography, entity versus aberration, and self versus space, in a self-referential, blurry, digital and mystical setting.

This film visualizes humanity’s quest to relentlessly pursue goals. In the human fight for progress, the march forward cannot be stopped, even when individual people become weary and die. This animated short is based on a poem by the Chilean filmmaker and poet Juan Forch. Chilean painter Hernando León created the design.