Selection

Screening: Professional Competition 2
Brazil 2025
Duration: 12:18
Directed: Rosana Urbes
Screenplay: Rosana Urbes
Production: Letícia Friedrich, Rosana Urbes
Dialogue Language: Portuguese

“Sappho” is an animated short film, openly inspired by both the process of creating animated films, and by fragments of poems by Sappho (Island of Lesbos, 600 BC), the first female author known to the Western World. The surviving fragments of her poems reveal a connection with nature that inspires the aesthetics of the film: the characters are painted with natural inks, and the settings consist of stop-motion animation of plants and leaves collected in the park, and light, shot on a multiplane table. The narrative, in rhyming animated images, alludes to Sappho’s poetic expressions and the multiple readings of her figure throughout history.