The World’s Smallest Animation Festival is back in the Valley for the eighth year, this time finding a home at Chateauguay Valley Regional High School (CVR). The festival’s founder, Alain Boisvert, is a longtime filmmaker with an impressive career under his belt. He has worked as a director and animation filmmaker, but also as a puppeteer, which helps him to create the characters he designs for his movies. Boisvert currently lives in the Valley where he runs his production company, Le Matou Noir.
The festival is taking place on Saturday, January 17. This year they received over 1600 submissions from over 100 countries across the globe. The final selections that will be featured are 22 films from 13 different countries. Boisvert says, “We can expect different things. There are stories. There are films that are more abstract. There are films that are also based on music. We have a guest who will talk about her film at intermission.”
The event provides a unique opportunity for the community to learn about “different techniques, different styles, different films with different music, and above all, hearing the filmmakers talk at halftime is a wonderful opportunity for discovery for those who live in the area,” Boisvert says. His goal is to “showcase animated cinema in all its different facets, to really introduce people to different films and sometimes surprise the audience and offer them things they don’t currently see.”
The festival has been held at a few different places including the Little Green Library in Huntingdon and the Centre Barberivain. However, after the Centre Barberivain suffered from a fire last year, the festival needed to find a new home. CVR’s Community Learning Centre coordinator, Lorelei Muller, has been a fan of the festival for years, and she realized that CVR has the perfect space in the auditorium to host the event. She jumped on the opportunity to bring the festival into the school.
Muller hopes that students from CVR come to experience the festival. “Gathering to watch something like this with a group of other people, with your friends and other people from the community, has huge value because you can see the impact of the short films on the audience, whether it’s the laughter or the – the more poignant moments,” she says. She also comments on the fact that the festival is multilingual and multicultural, good things for students to be exposed to.
This is not the first time that Boisvert has collaborated with CVR. Last year, he was a judge for a film festival put on by Justin Langlois’s Media and Film class. He plans to return to speak with the students this spring and and be involved with that festival once again.
Boisvert reiterates that having events that are accessible to all is of huge importance to him. Holding varied artistic events throughout the year “makes different art forms accessible to the public and others. For our festival, I’ve always thought it was important for it to be accessible. That’s why there’s no admission fee. It’s actually a voluntary contribution. That way, everyone can come.”
Muller agrees. “We’re grateful for Alain’s contribution to CVR’s film program as part of the Community Centre Learning partnership that’s bringing the World’s Smallest Animation Festival to our auditorium on the 17th.”
The show will begin at 7 p.m. and will last about 90 minutes. Visit lematounoir.qc.ca/PPFAM/ for more information.