YES! Filmmaker(s) Attending for Q & A
Sat Feb 23, 2019 – 7:30 pm | Domenico’s
The Water Will Carry Us Home
Directed by Gabrielle Tesfaye
Narrative Short
U.S.A.| 7 min | 2018
Through living ritual and stop motion animation, The Water Will Carry Us Home reveals the story of stolen Africans being thrown off the slave ship whilst sailing through the Middle Passage. Upon crashing in the waves, the unimaginable happens when mermaids dwelling in the waters save these spirits.
Gabrielle Tesfaye
Director
Gabrielle Tesfaye is an interdisciplinary artist versed in painting, animation, film, puppetry and interactive installation. Tesfaye was raised in the United States as a first-generation American, to an Ethiopian father and Indo Jamaican mother. Her extensive international travel and exposure to multiculturalism in her life, echoes itself in her mixed media approach to art making and cross-cultural content. Her work is rooted in cross-cultural diaspora, Afro-futurism, Southeast Asian puppetry practices and cultural storytelling. Tesfaye uses the body in the form of otherworldly mobile puppets, as a vessel to personify ancestral, emotional, and celestial ideas, transforming ancient symbolism into contemporary languages and consciousness. In addition to exhibiting, she uses her puppets in stop motion animation in cultural narrative filmmaking.
