POETRYFILM MAGAZIN
96
»As an artist I have a voice …«
Aline Helmcke: Your animated short film »Hate For Sale« investigates what makes hate so tempting to the human kind. This film seems very relevant in a time where we have to deal with the fact that hatred is growing to a frightening extent in our society. Was there a specific incident or personal event that made you choose this topic for your film? Anna Eijsbouts: Well, it just felt like the world as a whole was going down a spiral: Trump, the refugee crisis, women’s rights being questioned and taken away worldwide, democracy being tainted by extremely subjective news sources. As an artist I have a voice and in the words of Nina Simone a duty, so I knew that the film I was about to make would touch on these things. How did you find out about the Visible Poetry Project? Can you tell us how it works? Actually they found out about me through my earlier film »Tired of Swimming« and asked me if I was interested in working on one of the films for April 2017. It was their first year and there was a lot of ambition (there still is, I think) to really make something happen. They select filmmakers and writers and connected the two, although in my case it went a little differently. As animation takes a very long time and I was teaching nearly full time as well, I knew that it was going to have to be something I cared about deeply and didn’t want to risk working on something I wasn’t fully behind. I asked them if they’d be okay with me asking Neil Gaiman to join in and they were more than okay with that. How did you come across Neil Gaiman’s poem? When I was approached by the Visible Poetry Project I asked Neil Gaiman (who has become a friend after we met at a film festival years ago) if he had anything poetic and political which he could imagine animated. We discussed my current worries in the world (which was a long list) and he wrote his incredibly powerful and poignant poem for the film.
Did you know about the genre of poetry film before? Animation as a technique so very often hinges on poetry film that coming from there I never consciously separated the two. In live action they seem to separate more naturally. However, knowing about it now and having had the pleasure of seeing (and curating) programs with the genre in mind, it’s beautiful to be keenly aware of how complimentary the writing and imagery can be! What makes the text so interesting for you? The most obvious aspect for me to turn it into an animated film was that it was written precisely for that purpose. But well beyond that, it’s very interesting to work with such a strong emotion as the theme of a film. It challenged me to work in a technique which I’d only done short tests with up to that point: the paper cut-out shapes are perfect for the ways an emotion can morph, alter perception, change facts and find its way into the people it infects.
