Retour à Hairy Hill

Retour à Hairy Hill is a film that took ten years to make. Dan Gies built it frame by frame — a 17-minute animated short about a Ukrainian-Canadian girl returning to the ghost town where her family once lived, encountering the mythological figures that haunt the landscape. It's quiet, strange, deeply emotional, and unlike anything else in Canadian animation.

I designed the sound and composed the music. The sonic world of this film is as much about absence as presence — the emptiness of abandoned prairie towns, wind through structures that aren't there anymore, the rustle of creatures that exist between memory and myth. The animal-headed figures that populate the film needed to sound both familiar and wrong.

Dan and I have been collaborating for fifteen years — twenty films together. This one represents what happens when two people have worked together long enough to stop explaining and start trusting. The film screened at 67+ international festivals including Annecy, won the Grand Prix Guy-L.-Coté for Best Canadian Animated Film, the VIEW Conference Grand Prize in Turin, and was nominated for a Canadian Screen Award.