Transformations: Terril Calder’s Animated Worlds

Friday, May 11@ 7 pm
Location:The Cinematheque Arthur Street
Terril Calder’s Animated Shorts (above image from Snip)

AND

Saturday, May 12 @ 7pm
Location: The Cinematheque Arthur Street
The Lodge Directed by Terril Calder
2014, Canada, 73 min

Terril Calder’s Animated Shorts
Friday, May 11 @ 7pm
The Cinematheque Arthur Street

Introduced by Terril Calder.

One of the most important animation artists in Canada, Terril Calder is a hugely talented Métis artist and stop motion animator now based in Toronto. Her films have won awards and played at film festivals around the world from Sundance to imagineNATIVE and Berlin. As one of Canada’s leading stop-motion animators, Terril Calder has crafted a remarkable body of work informed by her Métis ancestry and by her background as a performance and visual artist. With strong roots to Winnipeg – where she studied and practised – Terril’s gritty, visceral animations speak to a unique perspective that explores layers of identity, history and personal and shared transformation. This screening is the first-ever retrospective of Terril’s short animations, which includes Choke co-created by Michelle Latimer and Transformation, created as segment of Travelling Medicine Show, a feature film by Amnon Buchbinder.  A former student at the University of Manitoba’s School of Fine Art, she was also a member of the notorious Winnipeg art collective, the Student Bolshevik group. Calder creates gorgeous hand crafted stop motion animated shorts expressing strong First Nations thematic concerns. Her work has strongly influenced many Indigenous filmmakers and a new generation in film; Spotted Fawn (aka Amanda Strong) and Michelle Latimer were both mentored and/or assisted by Terril in their animated work. The film Choke won an Honorable Mention at the Sundance Festival and Berlin and Terril has twice made TIFF’s top ten list of the best shorts of the year.

“My inspiration has always come from my interest in understanding my place in the world and to translate my journey into artistic expression. Creativity & invention are my inspiration. My life’s purpose is to inspire others to think creatively and not to just accept old conventions as norms but to challenge them if they no longer make sense.”
- Terril Calder

Canned Meat
2009, Canada, 28 min
Directed and Animated by Terril Calder
Terril Calder’s film Canned Meat serves up an animated tale of a rotting beauty queen who attempts to
preserve her youthful image by sealing herself up in a Silverline Trailer.

“Calder’s film, Canned Meat, was a jarring and beautiful film that spoke to themes of isolation, memory, and community.”
-Tracing Memory

Choke
Directed by Michelle Latimer
(Co-created and animated by Terril Calder)
2010, Canada, 5:35 min
Upon leaving his First Nations reserve, Jimmy encounters the lost souls of the city and is reminded that no matter how far you travel, you cannot escape who you are.

*Sundance Film Festival (Special Jury Honourable Mention - Best International Short Film),
*Toronto International Film Festival, Canada’s Top Ten Short for 2011

The Gift
Directed by Terril Calder
2011, Canada, 2 min
The “Gift” is an exploration of betrayal and deception wrapped in a cozy blanket infested with the small pox disease.

Vessel
Directed by Terril Calder
2013, Canada, 1 min
Commissioned by Cinema Zuid, Netherlands One Minute Film series
Vessel explores the hollowness of vanity.The pursuit of fame and visibility within our contemporary culture leaves people scrambling for answers before they are asked. To brand them to the market for mass consumption and to iron out attributes within their personality that might mar their market value. It is a contradiction to my Aboriginal teachings as we are taught that humility is one of the seven sacred lessons. That vanity is a path to emptiness.

”...its eerie, unsettling atmosphere will stay with you for a long time.”
- Alison Gillmor, Winnipeg Free Press

Repercussions
Directed by Terril Calder
2013, Canada, 3:45 min
Vibrations still resonate from the lands past. If you paid full attention you can hear the history underfoot. Toronto has always been a gathering place for the interchange of knowledge, experience and goods. It has a rich history of those traditions and remains to be rich because of those traditions. Repercussions is a portal that examines the link aboriginal people have to the lands history and resonates into a future that is strengthen by this acknowledgement.

“A simple yet incredibly fascinating short that exposes the true magic of stop-motion animation…Wonderfully crafted….compelling…Electric Pow Wow” by A Tribe Called Red truly gives the piece a unique identity.”
- The Arts Guild Magazine

Transformation (From The Travelling Medicine Show 3)
Co-Directed and animated by Terril Calder
2014, Canada, 4:51 min
Transformation is a short animation that is featured in the film Traveling Medicine Show 3 that was directed by Amnon Buchbinder. First his cat got run over by a car. Then he had a near-fatal bout with cancer. Then his marriage ended. Now, filmmaker Amnon Buchbinder is trying to put his life back together and find a publisher for his novel. But when an ominous diagnostic result suggests that cancer may be back, he must find the medicine hidden somewhere between his art and his life.

Snip
Directed by Terril Calder
2016, Canada, 15 min
Snip examines the reclamation of history, literally ‘snipping’ it out of past colonial ideologies. Through the stories of Charlie and Niska, two children caught in the residential school system, and Gorden and Annie, two urban Aanishinaabe, the film’s ever shifting gaze moves into an indigenous perspective.

Keewaydah
Directed by Terril Calder
2017, Canada, 9:34 min
In 1966, Canada’s first inquest into the treatment of First Nations children in residential schools took place. The hearing emerged from the tragic death of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinabe boy who ran away from an abusive school and froze to death alone in the bush. Decades later Chanie’s legacy endures.

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The Lodge
Directed by Terril Calder
2014, Canada, 73 min

Introduced by Terril Calder (above image from The Lodge)

The Lodge is a stop-frame animated fairy tale set in the Canadian wild. War bride, Pearl Simpson, born in the slums of England, yearns to rise up from the Animals that co-inhabit her new world to reign as their Queen. However the Manitous have something else in mind. The Lodge” weaves together an English fairy tale, “The (Original) Three Bears” and the Anishinaabe story of the Dandelion. The lead character Pearl Simpson was inspired by Canada’s “Little Emperor”, George Simpson (1787-1860) as both longed for power and control. Unfortunately their damaged perspective needlessly brought suffering to many Indigenous people around them.