To Play Among Strangers page

Format: HD Tape/Beta SP PAL
Aspect Ratio: 16:9 Anamorphic
Colour
Stereo Sound
R/T 11 mins, 2005
Festivals:
Galway, Kilkenny Ireland. Alaska, Nashville USA.
Bergamo Italy, Swaziland Africa, Espinho Portugal, Hiroshima Japan. Tirana, Albania.

Won BEST ANIMATION in Aubagne France, 2006.
Nomination for BEST ANIMATION at Birds-Eye-View,
London.

Among Strangers is adapted from the book 'People of the Sea' by David Thomson. It tells of an incident in the author's life when as a child he first encounters a 'selchie' or grey Atlantic seal. The story is animated in sand, a material which, like the selchie, inhabits a world inbetween land and sea.
The film was inspired by Thomson’s ability to convey the ‘eye-to-eye and breath-to-breath closeness between living things’ and the ease with which he moved from the immediacy of the places and people he met into the paralell universe of the mythological stories they told. The dark shifting sand (only inches away from our face) makes simple silhouette drawings and shapes designed to leave room for our own imagination.