Cerulia

Sofia Carrilo's film is a gorgeous piece of stop motion film-making, properly titled something along the lines of Cerulia And Her Animals - they feature, as do her grandparents, an old house, finely crafted mechanisms and mannequins, perhaps with a touch of computer aided post production for things like dust (both adding and subtracting) without ever becoming as uncanny as Seven Minutes In The Warsaw Ghetto.

There are intersections of scale and scope - a chair in the greenhouse, what lies hidden beneath the leaves - moments of delight as simple as heterochromatic twins and complex geographies of houses sold and unsold. There's a real triumph in a moment where the film acquires an internal story, a play within a play. A puppet show propelled by imaginary clockworks explains the film's central relationship.

A further outpost in Carrilo's list of shorts, it displays the work of a large number of individuals, but as with any writer/director/animator it's hard if not impossible to say where the betweens of lines are found in the field of slashes. Detail is such that it's hard to tell if one has seen a face in a painting or if it's just depth of detail that causes pareidolia. We are primed to it, however, by a profusion of masks and other guises, the waiting-room weasel (or is it something in the stairway stoatily different?) the coney-counsellor, and so on. What's certain is that though it's a tale told by an imaginary friend, and that's the least of its magic.

Cerulia screened at the 2019 Glasgow Film Festival as part of the Final Girls programme.