The Painting
2024 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Michèle Lemieux
Genres: animation, experimental, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Using the Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen, the film reimagines Velázquez's 1652 portrait of Queen Maria Anna of Austria — married at 14 to her uncle Philip IV and trapped in a lineage marked by inbreeding — as a shifting play of shadow and light about captivity and women's place in history.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to talk about the pinscreen technique like it's some precious heritage artifact—and yeah, it's weird and tactile—but what actually lands is how Lemieux uses shadow and light to refuse the portrait's original purpose: instead of fixing Maria Anna in place, the film unmakes her, lets her dissolve. That's genuinely subversive.
Lemieux positions herself in direct dialogue with Velázquez and the Alexeïeff-Parker tradition, each choice (the pinscreen's resistance to fine detail, the refusal of the portrait's static gaze) consciously interrogating how art has held women in place—this is formal rigor in service of historical argument, the kind of work that lives at the intersection of craft and curation.
The pinscreen itself becomes the film's central decision: by choosing a medium that resists precision and embraces tactile impermanence, Lemieux transforms a historical portrait into something that breathes and shifts—it's a low-budget constraint that becomes the entire point, turning a museum problem into cinema.