Ottawa International Animation Festival Announces Line-up!

Oscar winner Torill Kove returns to Ottawa with Threads
Courtesy NFB

The Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) has unveiled the line-up for the 2017 edition of the festival. The festival, which is North America's largest showcase of animation and the National Capital's premiere film event, boasts a strong line-up of international works and Canadian cartoons. OIAF offers five feature films in competition this year and ninety-four short films in competition, fourteen of which are Canadian productions or co-productions. Also returning to the festival are the Canadian Panorama and Canadian Student Competition, which provide healthy surveys of CanCon.


The film feature films screening at OIAF this year include Clyde Peterson's queer stop-motion animation Torrey Pines along with two Japanese features by Masaaka Yuasa, Lu Over the Wall and Night is Short, Walk on Girl, and the North American premieres of two South Korean features--I'll Just Live in Bando by Yongsun Lee and My Dogs Jinjin and Akida by Jong-duck Cho. Unfortunately, Cal Christiansen's animated NFB doc based on David Hare's The Wall, but there's always the chance it might show up elsewhere on the festival circuit like RIDM. (If you're hankering for a Canadian feature, check out Window Horses on iTunes for the time being!)

The sturdy line-up of Canadian films among the shorts, however, offers lots of goodies. Oscar winner Torril Kove (The Danish Poet, Me and My Moulton) returns to OIAF with Threads, a story about the ties between a mother and her daughter. Also coming from the NFB is Matthew Rankin's excellent s The Tesla World Light, which gives OIAF audiences a hypnotic and feverish feat of animated illumination using techniques of drawing with light. (Read a review of Tesla World Light at POV.)

Other Canadian notables returning to OIAF include Ottawa favourites Stephen Woloshen (1000 Plateaus) with Casino, Elise Simard (Breakfast) with Beautiful Like Elsewhere, and Oscar winner Chris Landreth (Ryan) who offers one of the many entries in the NFB's Naked Island series playing at the Festival. Rising stars at OIAF include Amanda Strong (Indigo) and Terrill Calder (who made Choke with Michelle Latimer) with Four Faces of the Moon and Snip!, respectively, while End of Recording by Lukas Conway, Stefan Jaroszonek and Olivier Sommelet is the first production from Concordia University to crack the competition. OIAF doesn't play the premiere game, but one can guess that a number of these films are likely to bow in Toronto beforehand with Kove and Rankin among the best bets for the Short Cuts programme.

Please visit OIAF for the full line-up. 
This year's Ottawa International Animation Festival runs Sept. 20-24.