Animation Perspectives: Gudrun Krebitz_Moïa Jobin-Paré

A film projection shows a woman sitting by the water. In “her back” is the shadow of a female figure who conjures radiant golden clouds of dots and balls of lines into the frame with her hands.

Someone probes their own fear in a childlike voice and sketchy images. There are certain pieces of evidence, like the shovel and that black thing that grabs the soul like a spider.

Hands grasp emptiness or for bundles of lines. Their everyday movements are turned into a ghostlike play of gestures, because the devices they operate are erased from the frames.

A woman in love ventures out of her cocoon to go out into the mundane world of “dead language.” Two universes meet in raw, intimate drawings, shimmering stones and overpainted video sequences.

With pantomime gestures a woman moves her hands across the surfaces of a geometrical urban architecture, animating the wasteland with a glowing spray of sparks produced by drawing scratches on photographs.

The longing for something to finally happen is fulfilled by a kiss. Not the romantic kind, however, but a monstrous one, a kiss the world will talk about.

The film embraces the undulations of Jacques Hétu’s erratic composition, twists perspectives and makes individual notes shimmer as brief reflections of light on the surfaces of darkness.

She opens her arms wide: Crossing from an unbearable reality to the world of magic sometimes takes only the snap of a finger, sometimes several press-ups.

The photo albums of other families hold special secrets. The arms and hands of unknown grandparents, aunts and friends perform a ghostly pantomime.