Note: This interview was originally published on BFellicious.com. Date of interview is 2014. It is possible that some facts have changed by now.
We need to listen to each other’s stories.
We all have stories to tell and maybe the hardest part about telling your story is finding your voice.
I was able to interview Ann Marie Fleming; Canadian artist, writer, filmmaker, animator and writer of the original animated feature ‘Window Horses’. We talked about poetry, telling stories and finding your voice.
Ann Marie, what should we know about you?
I‘m an independent Canadian artist, writer, filmmaker, animator. I’m an immigrant, I am mixed race, and I’d say that hybridity has informed everything I do and everything I think about. I don’t have a favourite quote, but the one on my e-mail signature is from Epictetus: “First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”
Window Horses, where did it all begin? What is the message you want to pass on to everyone?
This is a complicated answer! The short form is: The basic story came from my time living in Germany at an artists’s residency, thinking about ideas of isolation, immigration, history, poetry, and the German diaspora after the second World War. Also, there were horses outside my window. Really! This was going to be a live action, father/son story. Fast forward 15 years and I was immersed in Persian culture in Vancouver, and saw so many similarities of themes.
I contemporized it to the Iranian diaspora after the Islamic revolution, and it turned into an animated film starring my avatar, Stickgirl… who plays Rosie Ming… and is voiced by Sandra Oh. The messages I want to pass on are many! We need to listen to each other’s stories. We need to know our own. We need to see ourselves in others. We can build bridges across cultures and generations through the magic of poetry. It’s about finding your own voice. It’s about world peace!
‘There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses’ said by Louis MacNeice, is one of the themes of the film. How did this sentence open your world when you first read it?
When I was in high school, we were told to bring a poem to class and analyze it. I thought I’d be all fancy and go to the university, to the stacks and pick a poem at random. This isn’t quite true, but it’s how I remember it. It was “Snow” by Louis Macneice. The poem talks about an outside and an inside. And the window, the glass between the snow and the roses, both lets you see the other side and keeps you from it. It’s impossible because of their difference, yet the glass lets the snow and the roses share the same space. “Incorrigibly plural” is what the poet says the images are. You can hold more than one thing at the same time and that means that there are many truths, as well. That poem, and my teenage interpretation of it, effects the way I still see the world.
Poetry is anything you want it to be. Just write. Don’t judge.
Ann Marie Fleming
The magic of poetry plays a crucial role in ‘Window Horses’. How powerful do you think poetry is?
Poetry is everything. Even when we don’t call it that. Poetry connects us across the millennia. That moon that a Tang dynasty poet writes about as he misses his home, we look up and see that same moon. It can be the deepest expression of all cultures, and when we read it or hear it we can see how much we share. Without knowing the language and the culture, we can only interpret the poetry for our own lives. It’s a song: “It’s a rock. It’s the end of the road. It’s a little alone.” (Those are words from Tom Jobim’s Agues de Março). I used to teach poetry in high school, (God, it is all going back to high school!) when I used to help with “problem” students. I said poetry is anything you want it to be. Just write. Don’t judge. First, free yourself to write. Okay, I wrote a lot of bad poetry – about the environment, about love. I used to write poetry when people died, when dogs died. It helped me with loss and it helped others. Poetry is there for you when things are good and when things are not good. I wrote them on t-shirts, umbrellas. My films are my poems, now.
You talk about ‘Free yourself to write’. Any tips?
Everyone has someone sitting on their shoulder, judging what they write. Tell that person to back off. Just write. You can decide, later, if you want to make it public. Everyone is a writer. Everyone has a story. Everyone is a poet. True, some people tell a story better than others do, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell our own stories.
Let’s talk about Stickgirl. Who is she?
Stickgirl is my avatar. When I was in art school, I was hit and run over by a couple of cars and I didn’t have much energy; I felt very run down. I used to get myself to class in a wheelchair and all I could do was make a few simple lines. And I drew the story of my life, thus far, leaving out the traumatic bits. So, she is very personal to me. I think this line is the most personal of expressions. And in this film, I’ve given Stickgirl to Kevin Langdale to draw and to Sandra Oh to voice. I’m very honoured to be in their hands, but it is also a great gesture of trust on my part or so I think :-).
We need to remind each other of our own stories.
Ann Marie Fleming
We need to listen. We need to love.
One of the challenges in life is finding our voice. How did you find your voice?
I am a lucky person. I think I always had it. The first film I made was about my relationship with my grandmother, upon her death, “waving”. It was so personal. How could it not be my own voice? I had been making a “mother/daughter documentary” and had just interviewed her about her mother and daughter. I cut this together, with an image of me, floating in the water. People didn’t understand the connection between this young woman and this older woman’s voice. So I wrote a poem, about us, so it would be very clear. I wanted to hold myself back and have it be about my grandmother. But people wanted to hear my voice.
I’ve made documentaries before, where I am doing the narration. “The magical life of Long Tack Sam” was a film about my great grandfather, who was a globe-hopping vaudevillian Chinese acrobat and magician. I was asked to adapt the film into a graphic novel. When I was trying to get the graphic novel I made for “Window Horses” originally published, my editor said she missed my voice. She was looking for the voice that had made the other film, the other book. But Window Horses is still my voice. Everything about it is me, though it has a slightly different face, a different style. The message is still the same: history is relatives. We need to remind each other of our own stories. We need to listen. We need to love. When we fully inhabit any story, it becomes our own. This is the beauty of being an actor, or being a writer, a reader, a musician, a human being. We can experience each other through our stories.
Sandra Oh is part of ‘Window Horses’. How did this partnership start?
Sandra and I met back in the 90’s in Toronto. She was going to play the lead in my film “Dog days”; about an immigrant Chinese family in the wilds of Canada, a love triangle between a dead but very talkative mother and her daughter, and her twin brother. Sandra is a great actor. I mean, GREAT. I am so lucky to be able to work with her. It’s so wonderful hearing her work in the studio. And she’s a great human being, too. I am lucky to be able to call her “friend”. I am not sucking up. I approached her to see if she would voice Rosie. I figured it would only be a few hours of work. My timing was good and she said “yes”. But I wanted her to read the story first. She loved the graphic novel so much, she wanted to help me make the film, and has come on as a
producer. She has been able to amplify this story and its message in ways I’d not have thought possible. We both want to promote diversity, represent mixed ethnicities, encourage young women, and tell good stories. She is also a big Hafiz fan. He got her through some hard times. For me, it was Rumi. Those Persian poets, they know what’s going on.
Why did you decide to work with Indiegogo for this project? How would you describe the impact of Social Media on this project and your life?
I watched a lot of fellow filmmakers do the crowd-funding route, and I just thought “wow, that’s a lot of work”. And I was right! I am a private person, so it was a daunting process, but I had taken out a large line of credit to make this film, and was looking in all directions for a way to fund it and keep my house (this is true!). What Indiegogo has been so amazing for, and I had heard it but didn’t fully realize it at the time… is the audience engagement and social media context. So many people know about this film and its message, and it hasn’t even been made yet! The support, internationally, has been overwhelming. The outreach is incredible, and we hope people will follow along until the film is out there. AND people are actually taking out their own
dollars and putting it in to our film. Humbling. I’ve given to projects, too, so I feel okay karmically about this :-). We have tried to provide interesting perks for doing so. Actually, making the perks will be a full time job, too!
Thank you Ann Marie for this inspiring interview.