SHORT FOCUS 2018: Tracing Coyotes – A Dog Crosses My Way [Theresa Grysczok/Eeva Ojanperä, GER, 2016]

Tracing Coyotes – A Dog Crosses My Way is a mesmerising display of ingenuity. An exercise in stop-motion photography, imagist poetry and abstract sound, the film ponders on ideas concerning existentialism, physicality and the universe. Where do we fit in? What makes us human? How are we different from and simultaneously the same as all things? Are we truly connected or is there something that separates us all?

These are some of the questions that arise from the film’s poetic prologue as we are hurled towards the cosmos – animated lines connecting constellations, which then breathe life into a pair of hands that play Cat’s Cradle with a looped string. The back of a woman’s head and shoulders lower gently into a soft bed of fur, her long hair swept to one side, as she then disappears through the surface. The jittery electronic score (by Tobias Zarges) wields itself back and forth along a two-tone scale that offers simplicity within its dissonant textures, which then opens out into a gentler ebbing of a wave-like motif.

Coming from the Sticky Frames production stable in Germany, Tracing Coyotes… proved to be a well-loved inclusion by our audiences at our first edition of the Short Focus film festival, and we are very excited to see what Grysczok, Ojanperä and the Sticky Frames team dream up next.

---

‘Tracing Coyotes – A Dog Crosses My Way’ was part of the Official Selection at Short Focus Film Festival 2018.

‘Tracing Coyotes – A Dog Crosses My Way’ is available to watch now on FLTV.