Squeaky Wheel’s 23rd Animation Fest!

Duration: Approximately 55 minutes. Content notes: Light flicker in the first and last film (diario de verano and Machine’s Dream), body dysmorphia, mourning the death of a loved one.

anivides, diario de verano
3:39 min, 16mm and 35mm on digital video, sound, 2025
diario de verano is an exploration of neighborhood flora in Tkaronto, focusing on Kensington Market, Parkdale and Wallace – Emmerson, areas we live and move through. Experimentation with abstract movement and the physical, compositional properties of foraged materials, strengthened our community/kinship to the land and each other. Artistic practices were explored and shared through gathering rituals, stop motion animation and phytograms, creating complex layers of ourselves intertwined through our latinx identities in this short film.

Mahda Purmehdi, Noli me tangere
4:29 min, digital video, silent, 2025
An excavational inquiry through photographs, touch, and looking at times and places far from here and now, animating and conjuring a link between past and present. My film poses questions about distance, visual and physical accessibility, and what these limitations and shortcomings say about subjugation of bodies, history, and images. Using the vertical perspective of a downshooter, I operate a visual excavation to form a correlation between personal history and wider political history of my home country Iran. Currently based in the United States, I cannot travel outside the country without losing the right to re-enter due to my travel limitations based on my nationality. Returning to Iran means losing the right of leaving the country, forcing me into a state of involuntary immobility. I work with limited secondhand modes of visual access such as satellite imagery, Google Maps street view, historic photographs gleaned from the internet, and my own personal digital archive of family photographs. Through printing, these images become somewhat tangible objects—my only way of interacting with places and beings in distance to create a moving image of a place I can no longer encounter with my own body and camera. This silent piece moves and digs through a vertical perspective, as if on an archeological site, trying to uncover or draw connections by examining how these images lead to one another. This process of making meaning is one of overlaps, displacement/replacement, and jagged movement—pondering the glitches and inefficacies of digital images at our disposal and the political and psychological ramifications of exilic existence, distance, and living with ghosts.

Martha Griffith, Menders
3:58 min, digital video, sound, 2025
What story do the marks of time tell? Menders is a three-minute animation following a female art conservator restoring Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus. Using creative methods that reveal imperfections and embrace fragmentation, she navigates the tension between a polished ideal and an unvarnished history. As she reflects on both the artwork’s past and her own identity, she asks: Can the beauty of art be found in its scars? This film invites viewers to see restoration as a dynamic process of making, unmaking, and remaking.

Lysander Wong, Foreign Bodies
3:30 min, digital video, sound, 2025
A simple itch descends into an outbreak with many legs. Certain things will always find their way to the surface. An exploration into the horror of having a body, of unbelonging. The film aims to capture the sense of dissociation between the physical being and the mind, drawing from my trans experience. Content Warning: Body horror.

Sonali Gulati and Sanam Sheriff, Our Body Ours
7:40 min, embroidery on fabric, hand-drawings on paper, stop-motion, rotoscoping, digital 2-d animation, and 16mm film on digital video, sound, 2026
Our Bodies Ours is a short poetic animated film that explores the nuance and beauty of trans becoming from a diasporic lens. Leaning on the music of lyric, it reframes gender affirming care as intricate, intimate, and meandering act. What does it take to stitch our bodies into their true and ever-changing shapes; to migrate between who we are and who we may become?

Heidi Stavrevski, Gleemond
1:35 min, digital video, sound, 2026
Based on the two-page comic I created for the RICE 2026 Anthology, the animation of Gleemond tells the story of Gloria, a little girl with big dreams of becoming an astronaut. One night, as she listens to the radio while getting ready for bed, the broadcaster recaps the day’s latest discovery of water on Earth’s moon, and how there is a potential for life beyond our planet. Bursting with excitement and wonder, she is tucked into bed by her mom, and begins to drift off to sleep. This transitions to Gloria dreaming of her own breakthrough discovery: Glowing moon fish, swirling around Earth’s moon, providing its signature glow. But Gloria doesn’t stop there. She continues to soar in-and-around our solar system, discovering more exciting creatures along the way. The animation closes with a panned-out view of Gloria’s dream sequence, revealing the happy moon. This ending scene directly ties into the title, as Gleemond is a combination of the English word for joy (glee) and the German word for moon (Mond). Inspiration for this project draws from the support my parents gave me to pursue my dreams of becoming an artist, while also reflecting on childhood nostalgia. My goal was to create a visual experience on several different levels, achieved via a printed comic, and an animation set to an original song, complete with custom foley. Overall, my hope is that this story encourages viewers to engage with their imaginations, and to dream beyond the stars.

Scarlet Thibodeau, Jeff and the Moon Have Tea
1:01 min, digital video, sound, 2025
A man named Jeff is having a tea party with the moon but has an unusual and dramatic reaction to the tea.

Tony Nash, Dumpster Fire
2:44 min, digital video, sound, 2026
A short story about a small fire.

Suzanne L. Schulz, The I Need More Time Machine
10:38, digital video, sound, 2026
The I Need More Time Machine is a short experimental documentary that incorporates animation and imagines alternatives to gendered overwork and exhaustion. The film weaves together the interviews of twelve female and nonbinary artists who are caretakers and full-time workers. From the vantage point of commuting, the film dwells in spaces of fatigue and repetition and then draws on forgotten feminist and utopian housing blueprints to create science fiction-inspired, fantasy-imbued sites for gendered flourishing.

Wendy Cong Zhao, A Grieving Heart
12:18 min, digital video, sound, 2025
A Grieving Heart is an animated short film about an immigrant woman examining her past in the wake of her American ex-boyfriend’s death.

Natalia Ryss, Machine’s Dream
4:18 min, digital video, sound, 2025
A robot that wanted to have dreams.

anivides is the interweaving experimental works of multidisciplinary artists Cristal Buemi and Francisca Duran focusing on analog and digital frame-by-frame approaches to showcase their abstract, study and practices. Exploring the idea of weight on our structures due to environments, experiences and their direct relations to trauma, healing and transformation. With a focus on collages of bodily works both in human and plant forms from a diasporic immigrant, bipoc, femme, queer and intergenerational perspective. anivides’ recent film diario de verano has screened at Playhouse Cinema and will show at Dawson City Film Fest and Les Sommet Du Cinema D’animation this spring.

Heidi Stavrevski is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Buffalo, NY. With her inspiration deeply rooted in nature, she creates vibrant, whimsical work that is both sincere and silly. Some of her most notable works include stories such as Traffic Wizard, and Gleemond.

Lysander Wong is an award-winning animation director working predominantly in paper cutout, mixed media, and other stop-motion techniques, aiming to connect the visual and physical to evoke a sense of tangibility and fragility. His films often investigate the ways we see, navigate, and inhabit the world, exploring identity and body through a queer and trans perspective.

Mahda Purmehdi (b. 1994, Tehran, Iran) is an experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. He works across the mediums of 16mm, Super 8, and digital video, often integrating original images, words, and sounds with reconfigured literary and audio-visual material. At the heart of his filmmaking practice are questions of modes of film production and the political implications of image-making. His films are characterized as visually tactile and handmade evocations, colliding archive and memory, visible and invisible, the living and ghosts, history (especially film history) and the forgotten. Mahda is pursuing a practice-based PhD as a Presidential Fellow with the Department of Media Study at the University at Buffalo. He holds a BFA in Film from Tehran University of Art and an MFA in Film from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Martha Griffith was born in Toronto, and studied Film Animation in Montreal at Concordia University. Martha currently works with a variety of materials, including: sculpture, mixed media and film animation. Her work has been supported by the National film Board of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts.

Natalia Ryss: Creator of animated and experimental shorts. Works as an independent filmmaker and in collaboration with different producers. Prefers non-conventional narration, expressive editing and mixing of art-styles. Participant and awardee of numerous festivals. Was born in Rostov-on-Don. Graduated from Art College and VGIK. Since 2015 lives in Israel.

Sonali Gulati is a desi independent filmmaker, a feminist, a queer rights activist, and an educator. They teach film at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of the Arts. They have an MFA in Film & Media Arts from Temple University and a BA in Critical Social Thought from Mount Holyoke College. Gulati grew up in New Delhi and has made several films that have screened at over five hundred film festivals worldwide. Gulati is a Guggenheim Fellow and has received support from the Creative Capital Foundation, VMFA, CAAM, and several other foundations.

Sanam Sheriff is a queer poet, performer, and educator from Bangalore, India. Their debut poetry collection HUM ہم won the Backwaters Press Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Nebraska Press in October, 2026. Sanam’s work has appeared in POETRY, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Indiana Review, The Rumpus, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Offing, The Adroit Journal, Outlook India, and elsewhere. Sanam holds an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. From 2022-2025, they served as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Bryn Mawr College. Sanam lives in Philadelphia, where they curate The Poets’ Studio at Twelve Gates Arts.

Scarlet Thibodeau is an animator and illustrator based in Massachusetts. She studied at Greenfield Community College, completing her general studies and later transferred to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation. Working primarily digitally, she gravitates toward cheerful color palettes and humorous stories in her animations and illustrations.

Suzanne L. Schulz’s videos and essays deal with practices of everyday life, hidden histories of place, solidarities across difference, and gendered labor. Her art is informed by her current work as an educator at Bard Queens and her former life as a scholar, which taught her to grasp new languages, to comb archives, and to read closely. A Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice supported this project.

Tony Nash: I was born in Buffalo and worked in different kitchens for about 30 years cooking food for people.

Wendy Cong Zhao: I am an artist based in Brooklyn, New York. I have been working and teaching in the independent animation field since 2011. I received my BFA in Painting and BS in Film Production from Boston University. I then moved to New York to edit and produce for independent animators Signe Baumane and Bill Plympton. I went back to school in 2018 and completed my MFA at Hunter College’s Integrated Media Arts program. My thesis film “A Grieving Heart” premiered at the Woodstock Film Festival in 2025.