WINDOW HORSES

Client: NFB + Stick Girl Productions

Window Horses is an animated feature directed, written and produced by Anne Marie Fleming.  It’s about love – love of family, poetry, history, culture. Here’s the story as told by Fleming: 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. This film is our small effort to try and add a little more peace, love and understanding to our increasingly complex and conflicted world through art, poetry, history and culture. 

I participated in the making of 2 animations in the film; the first one in reference to "the love bourgeois women have for their dogs." It was fun to focus on the design, and I animated it in the style of 1920s-era films. 

In the second piece, I animated the paper sculptures of Bahram Jahavery, a Persian animator/artist who immigrated to Canada. I really respect his art and vision so it was nice to be able to bring his ideas to the screen.