Calgary’s GIRAF Animation Festival Celebrates 17th Year with On-Demand Events Streaming Across Canada
Skwigly
The lineup has been released and tickets are now available for the 17th Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival (GIRAF), an annual event hosted by Calgary’s Quickdraw Animation Society. Following the success of last year’s Alberta-wide event, GIRAF is opening its virtual doors to animation fans across Canada to watch a selection of artistically adventurous animation from around the globe. The festival will run from 19-28 November 2021.
Highlights include:
- Featured artist Renee Zhan (O Black Hole, Reneepoptosis), whose inventive short films have won major awards at Sundance, SXSW, and TIFF, along with showing at every major animation festival out there. Zhan will host a retrospective of her work, along with an online workshop.
- An experimental shorts pack curated by anonymous Instagram account 24 Memes Per Second, who will also host a meme-making workshop for animation fans inspired by their unique take on (and encyclopaedic knowledge of) the medium.
- 86 (and counting) short films in 11 screening packages. Over a quarter of the films in this year’s lineup will be making their Canadian festival premiere, including films from Joanna Priestley, Grace Lee and Einar Baldvin. The lineup also features recent films from leading voices in independent animation like Yoriko Mizushiri, Felix Colgrave, Lia Bertels, Terril Calder, Emily Pelstring, and Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León.
- A 35th anniversary screening of acclaimed Czech stop-motion feature Krysar, a dark retelling of the Pied Piper fable heavily inspired by German Expressionism and medieval artwork, and presented from a brand-new 35mm scan.
- Top 3, audience choice winner at 2019’s Outfest LA, an animated romantic comedy from Swedish director Sofie Edvarsson about what happens after falling madly in love.
- A panel discussion on video game animation with a mix of major studio artists and indie developers, featuring Asemta Bhattad (Ubisoft Toronto), Craig Adams (Superbrothers), Pedro Medeiros (Celeste, TowerFall), and Price Morgan (EA Vancouver).
- Festival artwork and trailer by Calgary-based artist and animator Molly Little.
As with last year’s Alberta-only edition of GIRAF, this year’s festival will feature scheduled watch parties taking place in GIRAF’s Discord channel, where audience members and filmmakers alike can chat about their favourite films for a more social viewing experience. Or, viewers can take advantage of the on-demand offerings whenever they like, bingeing all the films in one go or spacing them out over the 10-day festival. All films, interviews and artist talks will be closed-captioned, thanks to the support of our Accessibility Sponsor, Calgary Economic evelopment and the efforts of Calgary’s Binder Productions.
Individual tickets to all GIRAF screenings and artist talks are $10. A full festival pass is $60, which includes a commemorative program guide, festival poster and stickers, to be mailed out after the festival.
Tickets and passes on sale now: https://giraffest.ca