Movies: Élise Simard

In a lush and lively forest lives a hedgehog. He is at once admired, respected and envied by the other animals. However, Hedgehog’s unwavering devotion to his home annoys and mystifies a quartet of insatiable beasts: a cunning fox, an angry wolf, a g...

When an extraordinary new resident – Balakrishna, an Indian elephant – arrived in the town of East River, Nova Scotia, in 1967, no one was more in awe of the creature than young Winton Cook, who became inseparable from his mammoth new friend. Using p...

Carmela’s fear intensify, as she struggles to protect her son. Desperate, for help, she falls victim to a series of cruel encounters with the Muse, the Angel, and the Demon...

A tiny baroque ode to fleeting darkness and pretty make-believes....

The documentary Little Big Girls by director Hélène Choquette sheds light on the phenomenon of early-onset puberty. Today, it isn’t unusual to see the earliest signs of puberty in girls younger than the age of 9, though this was not the case a few de...

Shannon Amen unearths the passionate and pained expressions of a young woman overwhelmed by guilt and anxiety as she struggles to reconcile her sexual identity with her religious faith. A loving elegy to a friend lost to suicide....

In this autobiographical animated short, Elise Simard crafts the story of a young girl seeking self-discovery and rebirth. Drifting between real and imagined events, the film uses time-lapse photography with ink and pastels, creating a haunting, comp...

Layering real-life details with an otherworldly magic, Thanadoula recounts the story of an end-of-life doula brought to her calling through the loss of her beloved sister....

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As much about light, color, texture and sound as it is about “story,” “Beautiful Like Elsewhere” evokes a mysterious dreamscape of shimmering tableaux that seem to exist just on the edge of consciousness. Populated by human and nonhuman organisms, cl...

Bear wakes to yet another ordinary day...

A rejection of romanticizing alcohol....