The Hometown
1979 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Bettina Matzkuhn
Genres: animation, experimental, musical
Hand-sewn tapestries by the filmmaker animate the words of a song about a young girl's hometown, combining needlework and cinema in bright, textured images.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hand-sewn tapestries as animation stock is genuinely deranged in the best way—most filmmakers would've digitized this into oblivion, but Matzkuhn insists on the refusal to separate the craft from the image itself, which is either profound or pointless depending on your mood.
Matzkuhn's integration of textile craft into the animated frame positions this work within a lineage of material cinema—Brakhage's handmade abstraction, feminist fiber art's political labor—where the seam becomes as deliberate as the cut, and every stitch asks what animation actually is.
The decision to photograph actual embroidery rather than simulate it in post means every frame carries the weight of physical time and hand-precision, and that commitment to the real object over the easier option is what transforms a whimsical premise into something genuinely textured and earned.