Animating the Surreal: A Conversation with Lavis and Szczerbowski
Schedule
Sunday, February 8, 2026
Run Time: 90 minutes, including screenings of shorts and clips
Followed by a Closing Night Party and Award Ceremony
“Puppets are ancient entertainers. They don’t just go back to the crib, they go back to the cave.”
— Orson Welles
For millennia, puppets have had a unique ability to command our attention. But what is their future in the age of AI? Over the past two decades, Oscar-nominated filmmakers Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski have dedicated their lives to presenting puppets on screen. From groundbreaking facial animation, to life-sized, photo-real puppets, to unsettling immersive experiences, Lavis and Szczerbowski have pushed the boundaries of technology and given us a glimpse of puppetry in the 21st century. For them, stop-motion animation using puppets is not a sentimental or nostalgic art, but a living, ever-evolving medium, pushed forward by digital innovation even as it remains grounded in the past.
In this one-hour presentation, directors Lavis and Szczerbowski—co-founders of Montreal stop-motion studio Clyde Henry Productions—will examine the evolution of cinematic puppetry as it relates to their newest film, The Girl Who Cried Pearls. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, the film opened the 2025 Annecy International Animation Festival in June and has already garnered several awards, including the Oscar-qualifying Best Canadian Short Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The filmmakers will begin by discussing their previous shorts, including Madame Tutli-Putli, Higglety Pigglety Pop!, Cochemare, and Gymnasia, and how the particular challenges of those films helped to inform and inspire their latest work. Following a screening of The Girl Who Cried Pearls, Chris and Maciek will explain how the techniques, ideas, and aesthetics of the film gave them a new understanding of the power of puppets to convey emotion and illuminate a story.
Special thanks to the National Film Board and the Quebec Government for their support.
Venue
Event Pricing
Children under seventeen (17) years of age must be accompanied by a parent or legal guardian at all times and may not attend events unattended.
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski
Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski (Clyde Henry Productions) are award-winning writers, directors and animators. Their first film, Madame Tutli-Putli (NFB), was recognized with an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short (2007).
Lavis and Szczerbowski went on to adapt Maurice Sendak’s Higglety Pigglety Pop! (NFB, Warner Brothers) and direct Meryl Streep in the film. In 2016, the duo were recognized with a nomination for Best Art Direction at the Canadian Screen Awards for their work on Guy Maddin’s feature The Forbidden Room. In 2017, 20 years of artistic creation was celebrated with retrospectives at the Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal) and the Annecy International Animation Festival in France. Then, in 2019, they created the VR film Gymnasia (Felix & Paul, NFB), a unique blend of virtual reality and stop-motion animation, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and went on to win numerous awards, including a Canadian Screen Award for Best Immersive Experience.
Most recently, they collaborated with Montreal’s Compulsion Games and X-Box to direct a short stop-motion introduction to the game South of Midnight.
Image © Lou Scamble
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