The prize for this year’s “Best Animation Narrative” went to Jessie Rodriguez for “Dreams – A Memory of Ghosts.”
This is how Jessie describes her work, which all the judges of the festival agreed is an outstanding piece of dream creativity:
“My new animation, ‘Dreams: a Memory of Ghosts,’ explores how I seem to remember my dreams in fragments, little pieces that are still with me when I wake up. Seeing the theme of climate change, I focused on bringing to life the dreams I had around animals and the earth. I have chosen an animation style of an early silent film, with intertitles as a throw back to early cinema. In this animation I have it split into three Acts, each one came from a dream. The dreams I animated all came to life from February-March of this year when I was recording them.
- Act 1-the Council: I look through the bushes and see a procession of animals who don’t know I am there, who seem to be having a secret meeting. They turn and look at me.
- Act 2-Cat Boxes: A house has towers of covered plastic bins going up a hundred feet in the air. They start to fall down and cats emerge from all of them. I catch some bins unsure if I should let the cats out or keep the lid on.
- Act 3-Premium Death Package: There is an old woman sitting by her future grave. She has purchased the premium death package that allows for up to $300,000 worth of classes each year she can take once she is dead. She eagerly awaits her descent into the grave.
To share with you a little about my process, I make all of my work and films completely by hand. I work out of Denver, Colorado in the United States. My stop motion animations are created from linocut printmaking. The techniques used to make these films involve creating every visual element from scratch. Characters, textures, background and text are made by hand carving each piece out of linoleum, hand printing onto paper and then cutting out, arranging and shooting frame by frame. I employ multi-plane and other experimental techniques for each animation. I love being able to bring my ideas to life through small-scale filmmaking, and am inspired by other filmmakers who used this process such as Lotte Reininger who worked entirely with shadows and cut paper.”
Speaking for myself (and not necessarily all the other festival judges), I was completely enchanted by the oneiric atmosphere Jessie creates in her work. The retro aesthetic—hand-crafted stop-motion in an old silent film format—generated for me a very dreamy and pleasantly uncanny feeling of open imagination and an awareness that the dynamism of the past is still a living presence today. The three-dream structure invites interpretive reflections on the symbolic and emotional interplay between the separate acts of the film. Each of the three dreams touches on the festival’s theme of nature and the environment, and each one expresses some special insight about the natural world, some little koan of ecological wisdom. Thank you, Jessie!
And thanks to Linda Koncz for administering the festival and the Elsewhere.to team–Gez Quinn, Kat Juncker, Dan Kennedy, and Victoria Philibert–for their support at all stages of the process.
I was reminded of when I was in elementary school, 10 years old at the time, and now I’m 58. I won a prize for a drawing I made of a barber cutting someone’s hair. I focused on the scattered hair strands floating in the air and falling to the ground. Those strands, before being cut, had lived and faced a life full of dust in the air (climate change) + barber visits (a recurring, inevitable gathering) + the falling of the strands (something the person eagerly awaits to feel relieved from the burden of heavy, bothersome hair)
The hair strands and dust in the air (climate change): My idea about the hair that ‘lived’ and faced dust in the air adds symbolic layer, as if the hair itself carries an environmental story, exposed to external elements before being cut. This aligns with the concept of dreams reflecting our concerns about nature
Barber visits (a recurring, inevitable gathering): The idea of the barber as a ‘secret meeting’ like ‘The Council’ in the film gives a ritualistic quality to a daily routine, as if it’s an unavoidable event.
The falling of the strands (awaiting relief): Linking the falling hair to the relief from its weight with the ‘Premium Death Package’ in the film. It feels like the hair represents a burden, and its fall resembles liberation or preparation for a new phase, much like the old woman’s anticipation in the film.