Julie Roy

The intertwining fates of two Vietnamese sisters who sustain a wartime relationship through written correspondence.

"What does the hangman think about when he goes home at night from work?" ​ The Hangman at Home is an animated film exploring themes surrounding acknowledgement and the awkward intimacy of humanness. Told in five interwoven stories; each situation presents a person, or persons in a delicate moment: fragile, playful, terrified, contemplated, confused, curious… We are all very much alike in these moments - alerting us to question our own responsibility and responses. Inspired by Carl Sandburg’s chilling poem of the same name.

Bad Seeds takes us to a bizarre world populated by carnivorous plants that can change shapes the way a chameleon changes colours. The veteran director of deftly connects growth with rivalry and evolution with competition, crafting an increasingly shocking duel that’s peppered with allusions to the western, the Cold War, board games, and much more.

I, Barnabé takes a luminous look at a desperate man’s existential crisis. During a night of stormy drunkenness, he receives a visit from a mysterious bird and is forced to reconsider his life.

The hedgehog between balloons, the feline predator on the hamster wheel, the fish in the lifebuoy: A young woman portrays herself in the best possible light in her self-description.

Tracks an unknown man’s life as he sifts through memories of his youth in Bulgaria through to his increasingly rootless and melancholic adulthood in Canada.

After her death, Gabrielle writes a poignant posthumous love letter to her grieving husband, Philippe, who is enduring the family ritual of the funeral alone.

From Regina's personal and visual memories, a tribute to her uncle Thomas, who was an artistic inspiration and played a key role in her becoming a filmmaker. A moving tribute to a poet of the everyday.

Standing still in front of the open window, a woman stares at the dark clouds that obscure the sky. Immobile, she fights against the remembrances of the past. In the clouds, a passionate embrace appears.

An animator dissects his own body, extracting memories, emotions and fears that will nurture his work. As he cuts into his skin, various symbolic objects recalling his past emerge. Reaching the heart, he succeeds in identifying the burden he’s been dying to cast off.

Every child knows full well that losing a tooth is only the prologue to a magical experience—namely, a night-time visit from the tooth fairy and the gift she leaves behind. So why, in this case, is the tooth fairy a no-show? These are the sorts of questions a father needs to be able to answer for his son… In this brilliantly simple animated short, Quebec cartoonist Guy Delisle brings to the screen the titular parent of his popular series, Le guide du mauvais père (A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting), published by Delcourt. Inspired by a common childhood experience, Delisle uses his trademark wry humour to reflect on the vagaries of parenting. A slice of everyday life, courtesy of the Comic Strip Chronicles.

Charles lives with his obese mother, and takes care of everything in the house. Constantly laughed at by his classmates, he takes refuge in a dream world populated by frogs. They help him through hard times that are about to get worse.

New York, 1905. Visionary inventor Nikola Tesla makes one last appeal to J.P. Morgan, his onetime benefactor.

Jacqueline has lost her mind a bit, but whatever, for her trip to the seaside, she has decided to take the train by herself, like a big girl!

Brilliantly mixing animated sequences and archival footage, Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre paints a touching portrait of virtuoso pianist Oscar Peterson.

From the moment she was born, Vaysha was a very special girl. With her left eye she can only see into the past, and with her right she can only see the future. The past is familiar and safe, the future is sinister and threatening. The present is a blind spot. In captivating parabolic imagery, the award-winning animation artist Theodore Ushev illustrates the world through Vaysha’s eyes.

Otherworldly frequencies and textured, fluctuating images beautifully visualize the distress of people who suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity, and who must live in exile from cities in order to find solitude from the noise.

Filmmaker and comic strip artist Claude Cloutier has made a striking satire on big oil, a musical where cars sing and dance while the planet falls into despair.

This funny short animation was written and created by Tali (At Home with Mrs. Hen) and is inspired by the filmmaker's misadventures as a school bus driver in the Eastern Townships. Our protagonist dreams of becoming a bus driver in order to cruise down quiet country lanes and connect with nature, her young charges and their parents. But her idyllic view of her new job is sorely tested after she meets her surly boss, named Killer, and discovers that winding roads can prove treacherous in winter, especially with a faulty clutch. Through her cheeky humour and oblique look at the reality of people living in the Quebec countryside, Tali delivers a film that is unique, witty and touching. - Written by NFB

This animated film is above all a love story told with emotion and delicacy. A man loves a woman; both of them love literature. We discover the murmur of their lives, the harmony of their feelings—and we learn how their affection for novels and poetry marks their existence beyond death. The fruitful alliance of filmmaker Félix Dufour-Laperrière’s imagery and the words of Quebec poet Hélène Dorion results in a subtle, sensitive film that resonates in the viewer’s heart and mind. In its hybridization of styles and techniques, The Day Is Listening is also a most modern and daring work: its director has deftly expanded the spectrum of traditional hand-drawn animation, incorporating mosaics of real images that express a myriad of intertwining memories as well as the pulse of urban life.

The first of a trilogy, this animated media film embraces novel production and broadcasting methods to embrace a non-narrative, open form. FOREIGN BODIES was created using video light painting and modern medical imaging (CT, MRI, cryosection), generating a mythical landscape of transparent bodies, and instilling a sense of strangeness that our own bodies can sometimes inspire.

Animated short about a dog's role in his family

This is the story about a boy not like the others that dreams about finding his place in the world.

An allegory of mankind heading for disaster, this animated short is a tragic vision inspired by the 4th movement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. Drawing on the composer’s brilliant ability to evoke work and labour in his music, animator Patrick Bouchard brings earth to life through animated clay sculptures, creating a tactile nightmare in which man is his own slave driver.

In this animated short, a young couple washed onto a strange, inhospitable shore, attempts to transform the land into an Eden. Through great effort they prosper, learning to conquer nature and their environment. But what will their victory mean? Alternately a vision of paradise and purgatory, with allusions to the Book of Genesis and prehistory, the film tells the story of human beings and their conquests, offering a dark, critical view of the rise and fall of civilizations.

Sexy models and Sick minds of serial killers and psychopaths.

In the vestibule of a hospital room, a young boy waits to see his dying mother. The clamor and spiralling movements of bodies around him intensify, forming a grotesque circus—a cacophonous circle that pushes the child back, depriving him of one final touch of his mother's hand. Using rotoscoped drawings suggestive of charcoal sketches, as well as 3D and object animation techniques, The Circus compels viewing with its unsettling realism. Colour is employed metaphorically to subtly express the promise and the memory of maternal affection. Nicolas Brault's highly personal film, suffused with poetic modesty, casts a poignantly sincere gaze on the heartbreak of a child facing the fearful, mysterious experience of his mother's death.

Mamori transports us into a black-and-white universe of fluid shapes, dappled and striated with shadows and light, where the texture of the visuals and of the celluloid itself have been transformed through the filmmaker’s artistry. The raw material of images and sounds was captured in the Amazon rainforest by filmmaker Karl Lemieux and avant-garde composer Francisco López, a specialist in field recordings. Re-filming the photographs on 16 mm stock, then developing the film stock itself and digitally editing the whole, Lemieux transmutes the raw images and accompanying sounds into an intense sensory experience at the outer limits of representation and abstraction. Fragmented musical phrases filter through the soundtrack, evoking in our imagination the clamour of the tropical rainforest in this remote Amazonian location called Mamori.

A sudden rainstorm is unleashed on a city. Everyone seeks refuge. When the clouds thin out, life continues.

In 1877, a fierce creature, known as Bovinus Spiritualis (the Black Hodag) was discovered in the northern woods of Oneida County, Wisconsin. To this day, locals whisper of the Black Forest, and the curse of the creature that dwells within. "Backwoods Bloodbath" is an old school horror-gore flick about six friends who take a road trip to a back country town where a local legend has been feeding off the population for decades, only to find themselves becoming the latest items on the creature's menu.

The curtains of a theatre open onto a smaller puppet theatre presided over by Marianne. The ringmaster waves her baton at three shadowy acrobats that climb one by one out of her hat. Each performs his number, although not without some difficulty. The clumsiness of the first, the mischievousness of the second, and the fieriness of the third trigger a few clashes that ultimately lead to chaos. How can Marianne create harmony without losing control? Will her show flop? Who's really calling the shots, the little puppet or her acrobats?