Pourvu qu'ils me laissent le temps

The ErlKing

This animated short is a visual representation of Goethe's poem, The ErlKing that uses sand-on-glass animation set to the music of Franz Schubert. The moving images, resembling woodcuts, capture the haunting, nightmarish quality of the tale of the ErlKing who steals and kills a little boy.

Kobzar 2015

In the adaptation of a poem by Taras Shevchenko in the last third of XVIII a small fraction of 300 Cossacks who were enslaving their own people for Turkey and were executed by other Zaporizhian Sich Cossacks are reanimated as living dead at one cold night.

Namoo

A narrative poem brought to life and an ode to a grandfather's passing, NAMOO—which translates to “tree” in Korean—follows the journey of a budding artist from beginning to end.

Dear Basketball

An animated telling of Kobe Bryant's titular poem, signaling his retirement from the sport that made his name.

Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale

An animated film based on the painting about Max Ernst of the same title, he said that a “fevervision” he had experienced when he was sick with measles as a child inspired him to compose the haunting scene that unfolds in Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale. Merging collage and painting, he affixed a wooden gate, parts of a toy house, and a knob to a dreamlike painted landscape. A blue sky dominates the composition, and in it a small nightingale hovers above two young girls. The painting features what would come to be identified as the defining preoccupations of Surrealism, a movement in which Ernst was a central figure: dreams and the unconscious; sexuality (as represented, for example, by the girl’s phallic knife); and incongruous juxtapositions.

Afterimages

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.

The Nightmare Before Christmas: The Original Poem

Tim Burton's original poem narrated by Christopher Lee.

I Would Like to Live on the Moon

A young non-binary person feels overwhelmed and wants to escape - literally, to the moon.

Onion

A short animation based on the poem "Onion" by Wislawa Szymborska.

Apartment is as Quiet as Paper

A small film based on a poem by Osip Mandelstam. What the poet is thinking about, sitting in his apartment.

Jellyhead Goes on a Walk

A poem about a person with jelly for a head.

The Boy in the Bubble

Rupert, a ten year old boy, falls hopelessly in love for the first time. When it all goes terribly wrong, he wishes never to experience heartache again. Turning to a book of magic, he invokes a spell to shield him from emotion forever.

Happy

An animated poem about the fleeting nature of happiness.

Bull Durham

Veteran catcher Crash Davis is brought to the minor league Durham Bulls to help their up and coming pitching prospect, "Nuke" Laloosh. Their relationship gets off to a rocky start and is further complicated when baseball groupie Annie Savoy sets her sights on the two men.

Shades of Fern

Based on the only extensive prose work by the surrealist painter Josef Capek, Shades of Fern most resembles the philosophical fairy tales and fables of Josef’s older brother, the legendary Czech novelist and playwright Karel Capek. Two young poachers, more boys than men, kill a gamekeeper when they are caught illegally hunting. Panicked, they retreat into a forest that grows steadily more forbidding and deadly as their fear for the future—and guilt over their action—mounts. Loosely based on hundreds of oral folk tales and legends that haunt the woods of Czechoslovakia, Vlácil’s contemporary updating artistically underscores the relationship between man and nature, crime and punishment, isolation and society, and guilt and memory.