A Child's Garden of Poetry

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.

Afterimages

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.

The Poet: Becoming

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

Hedgehog's Home

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 Letter On A Bicycle

Narrated as a letter to a mother, this short film traces the emotional undercurrents of leaving home and adjusting to a new environment, blending inner transformation with the changing landscape.

Lines

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

The Blue Years

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.

The Whimsical Council

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.

Un spectacle interrompu

The Spring Night

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.

Pour ne pas oublier l'invisible

The Infinite

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

Synapses

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

Trans Boy Remember

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.

Two Faces

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.

Rosaura

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.

Window Horses: The Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming

Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a Poetry Festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather be in Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians, all who tell her stories that force her to confront her past; the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of Poetry itself. It’s about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry. Rosie goes on an unwitting journey of forgiveness, reconciliation, and perhaps above all, understanding, through learning about her father’s past, her own cultural identity, and her responsibility to it.

Datum Point

Yoshiro Ishihara (1915–1977), who burst upon the scene of Japanese modern poetry in the mid-1950s, is now remembered as a “poet of silence.” He said, “A poem is an impulse to resist writing.” This film is an attempt to seek out the landscape from his poem.

Autumn

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

Em direção à Ítaca