Oscar-Qualifying Run set for 2D animated feature directed by Ann Marie Fleming employing a myriad of visual styles from more than a dozen animators including Kevin Langdale, Janet Perlman, Bahram Javaheri and Jody Kramer.
First Pond Entertainment has acquired U.S. rights to Ann Marie Fleming’s animated feature Window Horses, according to a report by Screen Daily.
Co-produced by the National Film Board of Canada alongside Fleming’s Stick Girl Productions and producer and voice talent Sandra Oh, Window Horses centers on Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet living with her overbearing Chinese grandparents who gets invited to perform at a poetry festival in Iran. Rosie travels to Iran where she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians who tell her stories that make her confront her past: The Iranian father she assumed abandoned her, and the nature of poetry itself.
First Pond has set an Oscar-qualifying run for Window Horses at the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles on September 29th, to be followed by a limited release.
Window Horses was partially funded by a successful crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, which raised $80,000 dollars from 730 backers from 28 different countries. It premiered at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in 2016 and was an official selection at both the Toronto International Film Festival and the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
It is a film filled with poetry and stories. While the narrative of the film is presented in one particular style, the poems and histories are created by different artists, to both accentuate and blend the myriad differences in cultures, philosophies, time frames and poetry. More than a dozen animators, including Kevin Langdale, Janet Perlman, Bahram Javaheri and Jody Kramer, worked on the film with Fleming.
The film’s voice actors include Sandra Oh (Rosie), Ellen Page (Kelly, Rosie’s best friend), Don McKellar (a young poet named Dietmar), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Mehrnaz, a professor at the University of Tehran) and Nancy Kwan (Gloria, Rosie’s overprotective grandmother).
Formerly Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network, Jennifer Wolfe has worked in the Media & Entertainment industry as a writer and PR professional since 2003.
