Meet the Filmmakers: The Story Behind the Story
Read, listen, enjoy.
We introduce filmmakers featured as guests at the Anbar Festival: four female directors whose films were screened in the international and student programs. They shared their creative journeys, the inspirations behind their stories, personal experiences, and struggles, without which their films wouldn’t exist. Imagination is the art of connecting ideas that seem unrelated. Animation, above all, is the perfect medium to bring these worlds to life. Read, listen, enjoy.
Dog Alone, directed by Portuguese filmmaker Marta Reis Andrade, is a story of loneliness and emotional distance. At its center is a girl drifting unseen through the crowds of a big city. When she returns to her family’s countryside home, her solitude deepens. In yellow sepia tones, time feels still, and conversations are stripped of warmth, automatic and empty. She soon notices her grandfather caught in his own silent crisis, while a dog’s bark echoes through the neighborhood. Drawn by curiosity, she begins to explore. Faced with the dog, fear awakens the little girl inside her, but also opens a path to her inner child, the part still capable of longing for touch, connection, and love. Dressed in red, she moves through a pale world, growing younger as the story unfolds. Through magical realism, the film offers a quiet psychological reflection on emotional crisis and the inner journey of finding oneself again.
On Hold, by Swiss director Delia Hess, is a bizarre tale that explores the paralyzing feeling of stagnation in an urban environment. In monochrome black-and-white animation, we follow a young woman stuck in the waiting line of a telephone hotline. Meanwhile, scenes of superficial modern life unfold: people attend yoga classes, jog, ride trains, visit galleries… These parallel images overlap with her absent-minded gestures: rubbing the leaves of houseplants, dipping a finger into the fish tank, playing with spilled water on the table. Lost in repetition, she drifts into thought, suspended in a limbo where time feels both frozen and relentlessly passing. Immersing us in a space of dissociation and passive contemplation, the film evokes a psychological state of loneliness and disorientation.
Children of the Bird, a dreamlike film by young Hungarian director Júlia Tudisco, explores the symbolic balance between creation and destruction. Drawing on mythological imagery, the director tells a story of the birth and death of our planet. Traditionally, the power of creation and nature is embodied in the feminine, while the force of destruction and civilization is represented through the masculine. The tragedy lies in their will, but ultimate inability, to coexist. Through colorful explosions and mesmerizing sound design, the film lets go of anthropocentrism, portraying the end of planet Earth not as a tragedy, but as part of the inevitable cycle of life.
FRIED!, by young British director Lizzie Watts, is a creepy yet humorous cinematic trip. The story follows Dev, a man driving home from a mysterious, aging nuclear facility, who becomes stranded at an isolated emu farm run by two mystical older lesbians. The eerie atmosphere sets up a horror-like narrative. Dev seems destined to be sacrificed at a local stone circle. But unexpectedly, the story spirals into a hallucinatory, electric party, where Dev awakens his own inner beat. With an eclectic visual style, glitchy textures, bursts of vivid color, dark tones, and strange creatures, the film pulls us into a weird, pulsating world.
Author: Ivona Djuric
