THE UNRELIEVED WEIGHT OF AN INERT MASS
Eirini Vianelli
Greece
A competent but sleep-deprived mother struggles with the burden of her thoughts in a weightless world. When she confronts her guilt, things fall into place.
SYNOPSIS
A mother of a 5-year-old is lying irritably awake at night. She aggressively tries to calm herself to sleep, but her murkiest thoughts spiral out of control and quickly accumulate into a self-loathing tirade, questioning her abysmal existence. Meanwhile, the world around her becomes lighter and weightless. When she belligerently hushes her psychoanalytical rant by recounting her day, she unearths the weighted guilt she carries and balance is restored.
INTENTION
As a young mother, I am constantly bombarded by well-meaning, yet burdening parenting advice that can highlight one’s shortcomings. We are convinced that anything wrong with a person, even a middle-aged one, can only have one cause: inadequate parenting in the early years. And yet our working lives remain just as arduous and we are promised that a work-life balance is attainable.
This is the protagonist’s world. She is a perfectionist at work and a very caring mother. As the rule abiding offspring of a hypercritical mother however, she has vowed to be an empathetic parent. She is committed to her child’s happiness and wants to abolish suffering. But when the pressure becomes too much and she reaches her limit, she violently snaps. The guilt weighs her down but her child forgives her. She is good enough and according to Winnicott, that is what matters. Through stop motion animation, this psychoanalytical self-flagellation will distance the audience from the subject in order to have a more humorous and unbiased perspective, while challenging our own critical voices. Most of us have been concerned about gaining weight but there is something comical about a plasticine puppet losing sleep over it too.
DIRECTOR
Eirini Vianelli
Eirini Vianelli has a BA in Graphic Design (University of the Arts London) and an MFA in Experimental Animation (California Institute of Arts). She has completed two shorts, Icebergs and Ready. Icebergs was selected at Oberhausen ISFF, Sarajevo IFF and San Francisco IFF where it was awarded Best Animated short, qualifying for the 91st Academy Awards.
PRODUCER
Danae Spathara
Danae Spathara is an EAVE Producers Workshop alumna. She holds a BA in Theatre Studies (Kapodistrian University, Athens) & an MA in Film & Television Production (University of Bristol, UK). She line-produced the Greek branch for Triangle of Sadness (Golden Palm, Cannes FF). She produced the short Ready by Eirini Vianelli and is currently producing two features.
Genre
Dramedy
Length
10 min
Technique
Animation, Stop Motion
Language
English
Production company
Heretic (Greece)
Estimated budget
€75.000
Looking for
Coproducers, Post-Production, Sales, Distribution