Assembly
2012 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Jenn Strom
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, provocative, tender
Hands edit film on a flatbed while fragments of chained marches, protests, and speeches intercut in paint-on-glass animation. The rhythmic assembly honours a women's filmmaking studio.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a procedural love letter to women's labor disguised as formal experimentation—which sounds like exactly the kind of thing I'd roll my eyes at, except the paint-on-glass fragments genuinely disrupt the flatbed footage in ways that feel earned rather than decorative.
Strom situates herself deliberately within the lineage of structural film and feminist documentary practice, using the flatbed edit as both subject and method; the intercut animation doesn't illustrate the archive so much as formally dialogue with it, a rigorously considered gesture.
The choice to let the animator's hand remain visible—the paintbrush stroke as equal partner to the film strip—transforms what could be archival reverence into something tactile and alive, a single formal decision that makes the whole tribute breathe.