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Alumna Ann Marie Fleming's Window Horses Named Best Canadian Film + Best BC Film at VIFF

Still From Window Horses X895
Ann Marie Fleming
Still from Window Horses
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By Roxanne Toronto

Posted on October 31, 2016 | Updated April 27, 2021, 5:13pm

Ann Marie provided ECU students with a Master Class on the development and production of her feature this past spring.

Emily Carr University is pleased to share news that alumna Ann Marie Fleming has been awarded the Best BC Film Award and Best Canadian Film Award for her latest feature, Window Horses.

Window Horses is a beautifully narrated and colourfully animated story of a young girl’s journey toward self-discovery. After being invited to a poetry festival in Shiraz, Iran, by a mysterious figure, Rosie Ming faces challenges and discoveries that ultimately lead to her self-realization. Unaware of the reasons behind her father’s disappearance, she has her perspective and conscience awakened by her experiences and the information she uncovers.

"This is not just a visual treat, it’s a rewarding and unexpectedly engrossing piece of female-led storytelling."

Wendy Ide, Screen

The first feature-length animation from the NFB to be selected for the festival since Pierre Hébert’s La plante humaine, the film features a rich colour palette sure to tantalize the audience. At times, it gives way to guest-animated sequences in which poetic illustration and artistic expression convey the spiritedness of living freely. Window Horses uses poetry, music and illustration to celebrate the value of accepting cultures, opening one’s mind and tapping into unknown aspects of the self as a form of self-transformation and spiritual transcendence. The superb voice cast includes festival veterans Don McKellar, Sandra Oh and Ellen Page.

Ann Marie Fleming graduated from the Emily Carr Animation program with Honours in 1989, and has since developed an international reputation for her films and animations, and her persona 'stick girl'.

Reposted from the Ignite | Youth | BC Spotlight

Congratulations Ann Marie!

More about Ann Marie Fleming

Ann Marie Fleming has been making award-winning films for over 25 years that deal with family, history, memory and issues of identity. NEW SHOES, BLUE SKIES, I WAS A CHILD OF HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS, even the dark THE FRENCH GUY all deal with tough subjects with a light touch. She adapted her animated feature doc, THE MAGICAL LIFE OF LONG TACK SAM into a graphic novel, which won Best Canadian Comic and was nominated for 2 Eisner Awards. WINDOW HORSES comes out of a combination of her own personal experiences and the stories of others she has collected and imagined along her peripatetic journey through life. She is mixed race, calls Canada her home, and that has affected everything she does.