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.
Mackenzie Duan
as Narrator
In the course of a real estate search a poem is produced. Images play around this drift between properties.
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.
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.
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.
A diary of a boy grappling with identity, love and belonging while exploring our fragile journey through a chaotic world.
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.
An experimental visual poem combining film, animation, photography, and archival footage inviting people to occupy the Black Body and examine the lived Black experience for a brief moment.
He stood, in pain, near the rope, in tears, while his creator hung.
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.
Tim Burton's original poem narrated by Christopher Lee.
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.
An animated tribute to the text of "If I Must Die," the final poem written by Palestinian writer, scholar, activist, and martyr Dr. Refaat Al-Areer.
A small film based on a poem by Osip Mandelstam. What the poet is thinking about, sitting in his apartment.
On the planet Gandahar where peace reigns and poverty is unknown, this utopian lifestyle is upset by reports of people at the outlying frontiers being turned to stone. Sylvain is sent to investigate this mysterious threat.
A young shepherdess and a chimneysweep plan to get married and escape the clutches of a tyrannical king in love with her, assisted by the guile of a cheeky mockingbird, the king's archenemy.