Director: Don Hertzfeldt Run Time: 91 min. Rating: NR Release Year: 2012
Starring: Don Hertzfeldt, Sara Cushman
Country: United States
Language: English
About the films:
Prior to the screening Hertzfeldt’s iconic feature film It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), witness the director’s awe-inspiring new short film Me (2024), a stunning musical odyssey about trauma, technology, and the retreat of humanity into itself. The film focuses on bean-shaped figures instead of Hertzfeldt’s iconic stick figures and, instead of voiceover, the figures communicate their thoughts and feelings through speech bubbles and abstract visual cues.
“Hertzfeldt’s work is sometimes elusive in its simplicity, but it can be profound as well; with his humor, darkness, philosophical yearning, and insistence on drawing every line himself, he may be the only legitimate successor to Charles M. Schulz.”
—J.R. Jones, Chicago Reader
A pre-recorded introduction by Dir. Don Hertzfeld will precede It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012). The film, which was an Official Selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival and is Hertzfeld’s only feature film to date, is a feature-length adaptation of his short film trilogy comprised of Everything Will Be Ok (2006), I Am So Proud of You (2008), and It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2011). The unique film was shot entirely on a 1940s-era 35mm animation stand, one of the last surviving cameras of its kind still operating in the world. In It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), a stick figure man named Bill struggles to put together his shattered psyche as he contemplates the meaning of his existence.
About the filmmaker:
Don Hertzfeldt is an American animator, writer, and independent filmmaker who has been nominated for two Academy Awards. He studied film at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he directed four short films: Ah, L’Amour (1995), Genre (1996), Lily and Jim (1997), and Billy’s Balloon (1998). His films are well known—and widely celebrated—for their distinctive style and existential subject matter; he has earned the Grand Jury Prize for Short Film at the Sundance Film Festival twice, and he is the only filmmaker to do so. In 2003, Hertzfeld co-founded The Animation Show, a festival of animation that brings numerous animated shorts into theaters across North America. His feature film It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012) was an official selection of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, and it was widely regarded by critics as one of the animated best films of 2012.
