With a world premiere in the Locarno Film Festival‘s Pardi di Domani selection of short and medium-length films, the filmmakers behind “Piluk” saw the production as a chance to tell a story with the simplest possible textures: pencil, paper and the human voice.
Produced by Marc Bertrand and Jelena Popović of the National Film Board of Canada and directed by multidisciplinary artists and longtime friends Marc Séguin and Elisapie Isaac, “Piluk” was created from over 8,000 drawings using pen, charcoal and pencil and accompanied by a soundtrack of throat-singing.
“I have the most immense respect for things that can be said with pencil and paper,” Séguin says in an interview with Variety. “Given all the technology that surrounds us, I still think that not all has been said with paper and pencil. So we wanted to go back to that craftsmanship. I mean, if Eli’s on stage or she records something for this film, it’s her voice. We didn’t want machines to be involved or ask AI to get involved as well, we wanted to just draw it the old-fashioned way.”
The story follows the journey of a girl called Piluk, born with wings on her back, as she crosses the countryside, eventually arriving at an unnamed city, caring for different animals along the way. There’s no dialogue: everything is communicated by its animation and by the expressive vocals of the choral soundtrack. The scratchy, sketchy linework goes for an impression of people and places rather than strictly realistic representation; the backgrounds mostly stripped away.
Isaac says that the same principles applied to the soundtrack: the musician, being from an Inuk background, has spoken previously about taking inspiration from traditions of oral storytelling. Isaac says that at first she had been content to collaborate with Séguin in pre-production, but that “[when] it became clear that we’re not gonna overproduce, we’re not gonna over-add,” she began to want to experiment with the human voice. She enjoyed the sense of ambiguity to the way the voices mix with the imagery, that it feels organic this way, Isaac says. “We ended up keeping it very minimalist. What came out is just trying to respect what’s going on in the image and the world.”
The idea of allowing room for audiences to project something of their own meaning was important for both the visuals and the soundtrack. “I think that was the purpose,” Isaac says of her approach to the music, “to leave space for people to feel.” To Isaac, lyrics and actual words or even “perfect melody” would be too structured; they wanted unpredictability.
Though Séguin is renowned for his painting and has worked in filmmaking before (as has Isaac — the two have even collaborated before on projects such as Séguin’s 2016 feature “Stealing Alice”), producer Jelena Popović, who took over from Bertrand during the project, points out that both are new to animation as a medium.
So it became part of NFB’s responsibility to support the artists in new territory, preserving their voice in the adaptation to working in a new format. This is, in Popović’s eyes, something inherent to NFB’s structure. “We are allies of the artist in a sense that we’re not profit driven, we’re a public money-funded producer and distributor,” she says. Making sure the artists can navigate this new space is but a small part of maintaining a sense of their influence over the story, something which extends to the NFB’s commitment to producing work by Indigenous artists.
“The NFB obviously has a commitment to producing work by Indigenous storytellers and artists,” Popović says. “Many other indigenous artists work with the NFB, and hopefully we decolonize the institution through all of this work,” she adds, after listing works by artists such as Terril Calder, Jeff Barnaby and Walter Scott. “So in working with Elisapie and Marc, like any other filmmaker, and especially Indigenous filmmakers, it’s important to preserve this narrative sovereignty of the auteur. We are there to help! We are not there to prescribe anything nor impose anything.”
The team of animators at the NFB studio was led by Parissa Mohit (“an amazing filmmaker and animator,” Popović says). “Parissa was their advisor for animation directing, and also the head of the animation team. These amazing exchanges, like the finessing of mise-en-scène and creating that illusion of movement, were really discussed in detail with Parissa and our technical director Eric Pouliot and the rest of our technical experts in-house.”
Popović highlights the goal of supporting artists and helping them achieve their specific creative vision, describing NFB as a “creative laboratory.” “Artists come to us with an idea, and we give them a playground to explore in the development phase, and do many kinds of explorations [which] are really not easy to get in the private commercial sector,” Popović says. “We are not based on return on investment.” For Popović, who has also produced shorts such as “Hedgehog’s Home,” “Manivald” and “Bread Will Walk,” the film being made in the way the artists envisioned is the real return on investment — something which stems from a passion and belief in animation as “the sum and the summit of all arts with a capital A.”
This is because, as Popović puts it, animation is “using the language of all the visual arts,” folding theater, drama and music into a cinematic language. “At the same time it’s an economical way of storytelling which is painstakingly long to make: you have to start from stereotypes and archetypes because that’s the language you know, and especially in short film animation, you have to adapt yourself to that economy of storytelling.” In their approach to “Piluk,” co-directors Séguin and Isaac have found just that kind of economy: finding the maximum emotional impact with the most minimal of art styles and musical instruments.
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