Animation, intimate conversations illuminate short film

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Edith Almadi never expected to be a movie star.

When she showed up to Misericordia Health Centre’s weekly arts program a decade ago, she had only planned to draw for a short while, taking cues from program leaders Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies to create imagery — flora, fauna, sunshine and moonglow — as a form of engagement and personal entertainment.

With all volunteer programs, participants come and go, but Almadi stuck around, returning week after week to share not only her artwork, but insights into her life, with Baird and Gillies.

The artists in residence and the 91-year-old artistic resident formed a surprisingly potent bond. At some point, Baird and Gillies began interviewing Almadi to better understand her.

“We just found her fascinating,” says Gillies.

“Her open nature and willingness to share kept drawing us back,” adds Baird. “We got to know Edith through the drawings she made in the program, which are sort of like drawings as conversation.”

After a few interviews with hard-to-hear audio, the duo hooked Almadi up to a Lavalier microphone in 2019.

With her Hungarian accent and gentle timbre imbuing Almadi’s answers with a sense of worldly understanding and refreshing logic, Gillies and Baird began to hear their friend’s stories in a new light — coloured by the realities of the pandemic, but also by Almadi’s personal travails.

As the pandemic began in 2020, and as Almadi dealt with the death of her son, Gillies and Baird recognized the universality of Almadi’s story while Almadi herself began to describe her artwork through the language of grief.

With Almadi’s blessing, Gillies and Baird pitched an animated film based on Almadi’s vision of the world to the National Film Board of Canada. To their delight, the first-time professional filmmakers got the green light.

The seven-minute film — Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying — is centred on Almadi’s illustrative style of drawing, speaking and understanding.

“The kind of animation we wanted to create was to build a world around Edith’s drawings,” says Baird, who worked with Gillies on about 8,000 drawings over the course of 14 months.

“Every frame in the film, we all worked on together. I’d draw a piece of it and Toby would draw the rest and vice versa.”

With a combination of watercolour and digitally-coloured drawings, the imagery swells with a loose viscosity, echoed gently by Almadi’s meditative sentences, which follow a free-flowing grammar liberated from expectation and traditional structure.

“This is just a memory,” she says. “I feel very, very much alive. I feel myself, very odd, I don’t know really what I mean with it, but I feel life — I feel to be alive, and not my age, no.”

“She’s able to hold the experience of losing her son with the enjoyment of seeing the sun through her window,” says Baird. “She has this incredible capacity to see both. In the film, she says, ‘As long as there is sun, there is morning, as long as there is moon there is night.’ Those things are present all the time, and they need each other to exist.”

From four hours of audio and several more of video recorded throughout the pandemic with the assistance of the personal care home team, the filmmakers chose to include the things Almadi said most often.

“We showed her every version of the script and the film, and in some cases, took video of her reaction because I think we needed validation that we were going in the right direction,” Baird says.

The film — scored by Gilad Carroll and Sam Sarty of Winnipeg shoegaze band Living Hour and local composer Andy Rudolph, who designed the sound with Kelsey Braun — resists sharing details about Almadi’s biography. Instead, the viewer meets Almadi exactly where she’s at.

“We wanted the film to feel like we’re entering into her world, imagination and experience. We wanted people to be carried away into her mind, to see themselves or someone they know within that,” says Gillies.

Baird and Gillies both dealt with the deaths of parents and grandparents as the filmmaking process went on.

“The most interesting thing was to have four years to talk together about grief and find universality between the three of us,” says Baird.

“My mother died just as the film was being released,” says Gillies. “I always knew what the film was about — feeling like you’re with someone only by having a thought of them. I saw Edith doing that the whole time, but not until my mother passed did I realize how good that can feel. I knew intellectually what the film was about, but now I really feel it in a different way.”

So far, the film has been an official selection at DOXA, the largest documentary film festival in Canada, the Ottawa International Animation Festival, and the LINOLEUM Contemporary Animation and Media Art Festival.

It screens at the Gimli International Film Festival today.

But the most memorable screening came this spring at the Misericordia Health Centre, where residents got to watch the film with students from nearby Mulvey School.

They rolled out a red carpet for Edith Almadi.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com