April 26, 2016 – Montreal – National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) returns to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival with the world premiere of the feature film Window Horses by Ann Marie Fleming, screening in official competition. Co-produced by Stickgirl Productions (Ann Marie Fleming), Sandra Oh (who also voices Rosie, the main character), and the NFB (Shirley Vercruysse and Michael Fukushima), Window Horses is the first feature-length animation from the NFB to be an official selection of the festival since Pierre Hébert’s La plante humaine (Arcadia Films/NFB) in 1997. It will screen in English with French subtitles.
The world’s largest event devoted to animation, the Annecy Festival takes place June 13 to 18, 2016, and hosts the industry’s leading creators and professionals. This year, there are nine feature-length films in official competition, with 10 more screening out of competition.
Window Horses is about love—love of family, poetry, history, culture. Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a poetry festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather go to 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 who tell her stories that force her to confront her past: the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of poetry itself. The film is 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.
The film’s voice actors include Sandra Oh (Rosie), Ellen Page (Kelly, Rosie’s best friend), Don McKellar (a young poet named Dietmar), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Mehrnaz, a professor at the University of Tehran) and Nancy Kwan (Gloria, Rosie’s overprotective grandmother).
In October 2014, Stickgirl Productions launched an Indiegogo campaign to help fund the film. It raised $80,000 in 50 days, from 730 contributors in 28 different countries.
The Style
While the narrative of the film is presented in one particular style, the poems and histories are created by different artists, to both accentuate and blend the myriad of differences in cultures, philosophies, timeframes and poetry. More than a dozen animators, including Kevin Langdale, Janet Perlman, Bahram Javaheri and Jody Kramer, worked on the film along with Ann Marie Fleming.
About Director and Producer Ann Marie Fleming
For over 25 years, Ann Marie Fleming has been making award-winning films that deal with family, history, memory and issues of identity. New Shoes, Blue Skies and I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors, and even the dark The French Guy, all deal with tough subjects with a light touch. She adapted her animated feature documentary, The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, into the graphic novel of the same name; it won Best Book at the Doug Wright Awards for Canadian Cartooning and was nominated for two Eisner Awards. Window Horses comes out of a combination of her own personal experiences and the stories of others she has collected and imagined along her peripatetic journey through life. Fleming is mixed race and calls Canada her home, and that has affected everything she does.
Quotes
“It’s an incredible honour to have been selected to be in the competition at Annecy, in such talented company. I feel like it is a gift for the film and for the many incredible artists with whom I had the pleasure of working on Window Horses. This is a film that has been in gestation since the last time I was in Annecy, as an observer, in 1997. How does it feel? It feels really good. It feels like acceptance from the animation community. The NFB has been incredibly supportive of me and of Window Horses, and I couldn’t ask for a better partner in bringing this film out into the world. ˮ ‒ Ann Marie Fleming
“The NFB Animation brand has been significantly enhanced with our co-production of Window Horses—not only in working with co-producer and filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, but in the seamless collaboration between the NFB’s Animation Studio and BC & Yukon Studio. For the NFB’s first animated feature in 20 years, there could not be a more gratifying convergence of producers, creators, and talent to now premiere at the world’s pre-eminent animation festival.ˮ – Shirley Vercruysse and Michael Fukushima
Quick Facts
- Squame by Nicolas Brault (Corps étrangers, 2014), an independent film supported by the NFB’s ACIC program (Aide au cinéma indépendant – Canada) is in competition at this year’s festival.
- Animation filmmaker Michèle Lemieux, who is currently working on her new pinscreen film, Le tableau, at the NFB, will also be at Annecy.
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Associated Links
Annecy International Animation Film Festival
Papy 3D
ARTE France
NFB’s ACIC program
Michèle Lemieux – The Whole and Its Parts: From Drawings to Animated Films
Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris
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