Synopsis

A short film made using pinscreen animation, The Paintingexplores the 1652 portrait of Queen Mariana of Austria by Velázquez. Michèle Lemieux demonstrates incredible mastery of the pinscreen, playing with shadow and light to evoke the tragic fate of Mariana, who was married to her uncle at the age of 14. Both painful and tender, this experimental work is a poem of a film: a meditation on the brutality of institutionalized incest and art’s power to capture the soul.

Michèle Lemieux

Michèle Lemieux is an illustrator and animation filmmaker who has taught at UQAM’s school of design for over 30 years. Since the late 1970s, she’s worked on 15 illustrated books for young people, including Stormy Night (1997), which was adapted to the screen in 2003 at the NFB. In 2006, during a workshop given by Jacques Drouin, Lemieux was introduced to the Alexeïeff-Parker pinscreen, subsequently becoming the artistic heir to this unique animation technique. She has made two short films using the pinscreen: Here and the Great Elsewhere (2012), which won a number of awards, and, most recently, The Painting (2024).