CHRISTIE PITS Park
Sunday, August 17, 2025

flow

With the short films Lichen and Starlight Sojourn

Latvian animator Gints Zilbalodis’ sleeper hit Flow rose from relative obscurity to Oscar-winning global sensation – all without Hollywood backing – over the past year, largely on the basis of its stunning visuals and stirringly emotional story. This wordless epic follows a young black cat in a gorgeously-rendered fantasy world who forms an unlikely coalition with a group of other animals in an apocalyptic flood. Equal parts climate change fable, disaster movie, and coming-of-age adventure, audiences will be rapt as the feline protagonist quickly grows up and learns to trust themselves and others in order to survive amid the dawning of a new age. Flow proves that humans of all ages love to root for the underdog (or cat).

Toronto Anishinaabe media artist Lisa Jackson’s experimental short documentary Lichen investigates the mysteries of this ancient symbiotic life form, which survives and thrives in the most unforgiving of environments thanks to a mutual reciprocity between its component parts, in sharp contrast to our own species’ struggle to live in harmony. Similarly, the collaborative animated short Starlight Sojourn is a dream-like meditation on the precarity of our more-than-human relatives, as a diverse range of creatures traverse a starlight landscape to the spirit world. Created by Yukon-based artistic collaborators Darcy Tara McDiarmid (Han and Northern Tutchone First Nations) and Chantal Rousseau, Starlight Sojourn takes inspiration from Indigenous knowledge and traditional practices and combines painting with digital tools to produce a vivid image of nature in transition.