Les Chasseurs de Poissons (The Fish Hunters) makes a great visual and aural impact. © Rosana Liera.

Les Chasseurs de Poissons (The Fish Hunters)
Using bold colors and a purposefully naive pictorial style, Rosana Liera has fashioned a myth about desert dwellers and the predatory fishermen who threaten them, despite the fact that no fish have been seen in those parts for eons. The film has great visual impact, and the several aural components — including the African-inflected music composed and performed by the filmmaker — work extremely well with the simple animation to create a sense of wonder and timelessness. Yet even after multiple viewings, the sequence of events and the moral of the story are rather hard to fathom. The fact that, despite appearances, the film isn't based on an existing folk tale, but was created by Liera from whole cloth, suggests that the problem may lie in the original conception, rather than in any failure of execution or interpretation.

Rosana Liera spent several years studying and teaching a variety of arts-related subjects in Italy, Germany and East Africa before receiving a grant to study at La Poudriere in Valence, France. Les Chasseurs de Poissons, which was created using both pastels and oil animated under the camera, and ink and pastels on cells, is her graduation film. Les Chasseurs de Poissons received the Renzo Kinoshita Prize at Hiroshima, and has screened at Anima Mundi, Annecy, Zagreb, Ottawa, City of Women (Slovenia), Siena and many other festivals.

The Dark Side of the Morning shows the other side of dawn. © 2002 Erik Rosenlund.

The Dark Side of the Morning
Erik Rosenlund's caustic tale of practical jokes and the tenuous nature of humor starts off promisingly with a nicely stylized rendering of dawn in the city, with light slowly creeping down the sides of buildings. Using pencil on paper to create an appropriately . . . well, dark . . . black-and-white milieu, Rosenlund displays a good visual sense. There are a number of imaginative ideas in the film, from the cubist-inflected characters to some unexpected plot twists, but The Dark Side of the Morning suffers from a strangely elongated sense of timing that seems misjudged rather than deliberate, and the gaps in narrative logic (e.g., the almost instantaneous appearance of a just-shot home video on broadcast TV) tend to undermine the film's effectiveness.

Erik Rosenlund attended the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, for which The Dark Side of the Morning was his graduation film. It has been shown at Annecy, Zagreb, Anima Mundi and the Ukraine's KROK festival.