INKWO FOR WHEN THE STARVING RETURN (TIFF 2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale

Anyone who knows Michif/Métis artist and filmmaker Amanda Strong, knows she has a talent for bringing together stop motion, bold graphic artistry, and gorgeous lighting with evocative and emotional indigenous storytelling. Her stories often consider the impact of colonialism and climate change on both the indigenous and the natural world. Inkwo means medicine. It is not only the title for a moving and fascinating piece of animation, it is also an apt description for the transformative healing quality that suffuses even the most turbulent moments in the film. A gorgeous piece of cinema that is both activism and art.

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MAYBE ELEPHANTS (TIFF 2024) – Review by Leslie Combemale

The 2D drawn animated short Maybe Elephants, from Oscar winning animator Torill Kove (The Danish Poet) relates her formative years in a semi-autobiographical account of her father, mother, and two sisters moving from the safety of Norway to 1970s Nairobi. A life sequel to Kove’s 2015 short Me and My Moulton, which introduces her sisters and the life they have in Norway, in this story, the family navigates the matriarch’s restlessness spurred on by seeming bouts with depression.

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