Sitting down with… ANASTASIA GRECH
This week I had the delight of sitting down with London-based animator Anastasia Grech. Not only was her graduation film ‘The Pursuit of the Flesh’ shortlisted for an animation award at the festival last year, but I also had the pleasure of previewing her film submission for Watersprite 2024: ‘Song of the Nightingale’. The quality and poignancy of these two short films made me very excited to pick her brain and find out a bit more about her film-making process.
Credit: @stasdoesart_
The Pursuit of Flesh depicts a sinister tale of an old man’s desperate attempt to recreate his wife’s face after forgetting her appearance. Stylistically, the film is jaw dropping, as everything is completely hand drawn and painstakingly scanned into a computer. And it sounds like Anastasia spent months snowed under mountains of A4 paper. ‘There were times where I just went crazy’, she laughs, depicting one moment where she’d convinced herself that everything she’d done that day was terrible so scrunched it up and threw it in the bin. ‘That was a bit annoying in the morning when I’d realised it had been fine and I’d just ruined a day’s work!’ It’s understandable how easy it must be to undermine your own artistic instincts when working all alone on a project, you don’t have the same checks and balances that you get from working on a film as a team. And in a grievance I’ve heard from many an art student before, the conflicting advice you get from different lecturers doesn’t help. ‘You just have to learn to go with your instincts’ she tells me.
So what were Anastasia’s creative instincts that sparked the inspiration for her films? It seems ‘The Pursuit of Flesh’ came from a place of deep sadness. ‘2 weeks before my deadline to pitch a film idea to my lecturer, my grandad passed away’. And Anastasia incorporated the making of this film into her grieving process, doing her family incredibly proud in the process. Something inherently so personal and vulnerable ended up resonating with so many people, as these themes of memory, loss and the confusion are relentlessly relatable.
The concept for ‘Song of the Nightingale’, an eerie exploration of the silencing of women, came from a similarly tragic place. With the backdrop of patriarchal practices such as the Roe v Wade reversal, and the Iranian enforcement of the hijab for women, Anastasia felt compelled to relay that feeling of suffocation that most women recognise too well. ‘Whenever it seems like there’s a step forward for women, there immediately seems to be two steps back’. Her use of puppets rather than drawings for this film works perfectly in its reflection of the way women are controlled and manipulated under a patriarchal system. And by no means did Anastasia approach this tentatively. The film is unforgiving and shamelessly emotional, as we watch the downhill spiral of a nameless woman in despair. The feminist backing behind ‘Song of the Nightingale’ is evident, and Anastasia tells me this was a result of countless house of research going to museums, reading theory, and even interviewing women on campus about their experiences with womanhood.
“Anastasia felt compelled to relay that feeling of suffocation that most women recognise too well.”
Clearly, Anastasia has never been one to do things by halves. Currently working on the illustrations for her brother’s children’s book (she promises there’ll be more colour than her films!), a submission for Pink Floyd’s 50th Anniversary animated music video competition, and pitching a hand-drawn animated documentary about pink tax and period poverty with her animation collective Lavendar Haus. I hope to see Anastasia again this year at the festival (she’s slightly worried that the man handing out free prosecco will recognise her from last year) and catch up more with all the wonderful thing’s she’s up to. In the meantime, be sure to follow her on Instagram at @stasdoesart_ to check out some stills from her films as well as her incredible painted pieces (I promise they’re worth a look).
Written by Lorelei Booth
