The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) selection at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), taking place September 7 to 17, will feature compelling documentary and animated storytelling from emerging filmmakers. This includes the World Premiere of Montreal director Marielle Dalpé’s professional debut: the animated short Aphasia.
Premiering in the TIFF Short Cuts program, Aphasia is described as an unsettling sensory experience that immerses us in the world of people with Alzheimer’s disease who are facing the loss of their language capabilities. The film utilizes a mixed technique, blending under-camera and digital animation.
Propelled by a jarring, lyrical aesthetic, the film pulls viewers into a disconcerting sensory experience. Visuals and sounds multiply and are superimposed on each other. Images collide as the voice of the narrator, Clare Coulter, dissolves into echoes. Meanwhile, startling glitch effects shatter the clean lines of the images.
In her debut professional animated short, Marielle Dalpé is not content to simply evoke the world of language dysfunction. Instead, she fully immerses us in it. The film allows us to feel what it must be like to engage in a battle with time and the limits of our own minds, while everything seems to be slipping away…
This powerful and important work highlights the ambiguous fragility of existence, and reminds us of that which makes us uniquely human: our ability to communicate.
The English-language version screening at TIFF features the voice of veteran Toronto-born actress Clare Coulter (Three Pines). The 3’45” film is produced by Marc Bertrand and executive produced by Christine Noël for the NFB’s French Program Animation Studio. The sound design is by Luigi Allemano, who also worked on Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis’s Oscar-nominated NFB animated short The Flying Sailor.
Since graduating from Concordia University’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema, Dalpé has been a finalist in the 2017 edition of the NFB’s Cinéaste recherché(e) contest, and received a special mention at the pitch competition held at the Cinémathèque québécoise’s Sommets du cinéma d’animation in 2020.
Following its TIFF premiere, Aphasia is also selected for the Ottawa International Animation Festival (September 20–24).
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