International Forum

Who makes history, whose stories are historicized?

For 25 years, Tricky Women Tricky Realities has actively created counter-histories: animation created by and perceived from female and/or queer standpoints. In 2026, the International Forum continues this practice by focusing on strategies and ges tures of feminist historicization. Addressing questions of archival absence, erasures, coun ter-archiving, and re-circulation, we move from “an archive of longings” (Susan Sontag) to repositories of resistance.

12:00 – 12:50

UNMAKING THE CANON: WHO GETS TO BE REMEMBERED?

Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre

When we tell the story of animation, whose work be comes “history” and whose work quietly disappears? We often explain women’s absence from animation history as if their films were missing. But many works are not missing at all: they are simply harder to find, harder to cite, and easier to overlook. Archives and institutions do more than preserve: they select, label, credit and circulate. In dialogue with Tricky Women’s long-standing work, the talk argues that changing the canon is not only about recognition, but also about building the conditions that make women’s animation impossible to erase.

Marie-Josée Saint-Pierre is an internationally recognized filmmaker and an associate professor at Université Laval (Art and Science of Animation). Her research advances feminist research-creation in animation, with a sustained focus on animated documentary, archival practices and the politics of representation. She is the author of Women and Film Animation: A Feminist Corpus at the National Film Board of Canada, 1939–1989 (2024). Her work examines animation as a critical, situated mode of knowledge production, attentive to women’s experiences and labour.

13:00 – 13:50

WOMEN'S ANIMATION HISTORIES: DO THEY NEED A ROOM OF THEIR OWN?

Jayne Pilling

What issues and problems affect the creation of his torical accounts and analyses of the work of women involved in animation? What role can a festival play in this process? Are art and agit-prop antithetical? A short presentation by Jayne Pilling, followed by a discussion with festival co-directress Waltraud Graus gruber and film critic Amanda Barbour, with particular reference to animation residencies.

Jayne Pilling is an animation programme curator/historian/ teacher. Founded the British Animation Awards. Produced and distributed over 20 DVD collections of UK and international independent animation. Books include: Women and Animation; Animating the Unconscious, Desire & Sexuality in Animation. Awarded the Zagreb International Festival's 2019 Award for Contribution to Animation Studies

Amanda Barbour is an award-winning film critic and President of Australia's oldest online film journal, Senses of Cinema. With a background in politics, she served as media adviser to the first Aboriginal Senator for Victoria in the Australian parliament. Her work revolves around undermining asymmetrical power dynamics, as the nexus of art and politics is theory and practice.

BREAK

14:15 – 15:05 PM

CRUISING THE ARCHIVE: CRITICAL FABULATION, ARCHIVAL ABSENCE, AND QUEER WORKING-CLASS HISTORIES IN VIOLETT

Laura Nitsch

Drawing on Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabu lation and the practice of “cruising the archive,” Laura Nitsch discusses her film Violett and its engagement with erased histories of queer working-class women in (Red) Vienna. The talk reflects on archival absence, le gal repression, and historical invisibility, and asks how animation as a speculative tool can approach frag ments and silences without resolving them.

Laura Nitsch follows traces of the disobedient, the stubborn and the unexpectedly witty in queer desire and working-class experience. Drawn to stories that refuse to disappear, she works with film, writing and scraps of memory. Her practice moves between observation and speculation, tracing how resistance takes form and how other kinds of economies and relations might emerge.

15:15 - 16:15 PM

IN CONVERSATION: CAROLINE LEAF

DIRECT ANIMATION - A PERSONAL VISION

„The nature of our work comes from who we are, the strengths and limitations of our personalities, and the times we live in. I will try to put my approach to animation and what I achieved into a context of who I am shaped by the values of my environment.“

— Caroline Leaf

This talk will be followed by an interview with Daniela Ingruber and the unique opportunity to be in conversation with Caroline Leaf – a pioneer and master of sand animation, paint-on-glass, and scratch-on-70mm.

Caroline Leaf’s animated storytelling films are renowned for their emotional content and graphic style, closely tied to the innovative direct animation techniques she developed. Her first film, Sand or Peter and the Wolf, was made with a bucket of local beach sand poured out onto a lightbox and lit from below to create a world of moving shadowy figures. Her subsequent films are refinements and extensions of this straight-ahead under-the-camera technique. She worked at the National Film Board of Canada and now lives in London, UK, where she maintains a studio working as a fine arts painter in oils, watercolour and mixed media. She is also an animation tutor at the National Film and Television School.