With over 60 international films, the Montreal Stop-Motion Film Festival captures tactile filmmaking frame by frame

Like a puppet show in a condemned building, or a circus in a deep, dark forest, stop-motion animation mixes the magical and the mundane, the fantastical moved by the human hand. The second edition of the Montreal Stop-Motion Film Festival captures that spirit in three days of big-screen programming for die-hard fans, the curious and the compelled.

“It blows everyone away trying to understand that someone gave life to these objects – and then you forget about the technique and let yourself go into the story,” says festival manager, filmmaker, Concordia University film instructor and all-around stop-motion enthusiast Erik H. Goulet.

He’s paired the screenings with an expanded conference section featuring a master class by the amazing British filmmaker Barry JC Purves, who will also screen some of his films, including Next, the complete works of Shakespeare in five minutes. Alongside Denis Wolff and director Patrick Péris, Goulet takes us behind the scenes of La Famille Sac à Papier, at the festival in its North American premiere.

The typical stop-motion animation process – long hours and incredible attention to detail – hasn’t changed much over the years, but new, inexpensive digital cameras and software have let the low-tech, hard-work charm of the medium shine through outside of professional studios. While the juried festival divides stop-motion into professional, academic and independent categories, the quality of work is often comparable across all three.

Among the 27 films
in the academic screening is Belgium’s L’Oeil du paon, an 18th-century tale of such high quality that Goulet had to personally confirm that it was made by a student. Fred, a performance piece about a fed-up clown from U.S. filmmaker Misha Klein, sets one of many tones for the independent entries. Among the professionals is the haunting The Twin Girls of Sunset Street, from Spanish duo Marc Riba and Anna Solanas.

Goulet does strive to balance the less family-friendly films with animation that kids love. “I really wanted to give a sense of the magic of going to the theatre with the family,” he says of the addition of 10 a.m. screenings.

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