Beauty Plus Pity

A Spot for Frog

Locked out of the school art room, a creative non-binary teen named Frog grapples with anxiety as they seek a new place to eat lunch. Imagination blurs with reality in this hybrid work of live action and animation about finding a place to belong.

Onikuma

Onikuma is Japanese yokai, a demon bear known for chasing horses. Surrounded by a foreign landscape, two women will understand that demons can come in different forms.

Lesser Apes

Lesser Apes tells the story of a love affair between a primatologist, Farrah and a female bonobo ape, Meema. Bonobos are the species with which humans share the most DNA, but unlike our species, they are matriarchal, live without conflict, and are unabashedly sexual. A paean to perversion, the film combines animation, live action and song to challenge attitudes about sex, language and our relationship to nature.

Dear Lorde

Fourteen year old bone collector Maxine Rose is looking for validation from her heroes. These include primatologist Jane Goodall, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and New Zealand teen pop star Lorde.

Three Things My Mother Never Told Me

What you see, isn’t always what you get in this Barbie and Ken Doll stop motion celebration of sex and surprise. Also starring Marie Osmond, The Bionic Woman, and The Lone Ranger.

Bad Ideas for Paradise

Funny, touching and ambitious in scope, Bad Ideas continues to deal with many of the themes addressed in Duke and Battersby’s earlier works: addiction, spirituality, identity, relationship dynamics and the ongoing quest for joy.

You Are an Amazement

Semi-autobiographical, experimental narrative film tells the story of a woman growing up battling mental and emotional disability, but with a powerful drive for greatness. Based on stories from the lives of artists and friends, the work proceeds through a series of short monologues, animations and songs illuminated by images of insects, animals and landscapes.

You Were an Amazement on the Day You Were Born

A darkly comic film that follows a woman through a life characterized by damage, loss, humour and joy. With a score that follows the span of her life, from her birth in the early 70s to her death in the 2040s, the film is narrated by performers who range in age from nine to sixty-nine. Her story is illustrated with images of people, animals, and landscapes.

The Infernal Grove

The Infernal Grove is an unsystematic structural analysis of drug use, addiction and recovery (not necessarily in that order). It is anti-carceral, anti-prohibition and seeks to amplify the voices of radical harm-reductionists and their coalitions.

Here Is Everything

Here Is Everything (2013, 15 min) presents itself as a message from The Future, as narrated by a cat and a rabbit, spirit guides who explain that they’ve decided to speak to us via a contemporary art video because they understand this to be our highest form of communication. Their cheeky introduction, however, belies the complex set of ideas that fill the remainder of the film. Death, God, and attaining and maintaining a state of Grace are among the thematic strokes winding their way through the piece, rapturously illustrated with animation, still and video imagery.

It is a work that contains specific details about its themes, but sufficiently ambiguous and free of dogma, including religious dogma that, our futuristic visitors explain, is a vestigial leftover from an earlier phase of evolution. And while Death is an ever-present rumination, so are Redemption, Affirmation, and Possibility.

Curious About Existence

Episodic in nature, Curious About Existence reacts ultimately against an uninspired but prevailing acceptance of moral terms. It begins with a song of worship, an ode to the looming nastiness of our organic existence. A celebration of disorder and entropy, the opening song seems borne of a curiosity about the possibilities of joy and freedom. In a more lighthearted segment, a squirrel and beaver converse about how everybody feels bad a lot of the time, which is compounded by the stupid things they do as a result. By enjoying the spectacle of the river creatures’ conversation, we are guided through another chapter of anxiety about shame with the opportunity for impunity.

Being F***ed Up

An episodic videotape combining animation and live action sequences to create a portrait of the artist's lives as they struggle with addiction, gender identity and alienation.

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure

Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure is a fourteen-minute experimental video that unfolds through a series of short episodes. "To describe Cooper Battersby and Emily Vey Duke's new video as ironic doesn't do it justice. Irony implies brittleness, cleverness and world weariness, but these two artists have...a sense of wonder at the endearing weirdness of life and all the vulnerable, furry little creatures immersed in it (mostly us)...[Songs of Praise for the Heart Beyond Cure] consists of a sequence of vignettes that share a kind of bleak humour, but the force of these artists' imaginations makes the whole anything but depressing." --Sarah Milroy, Globe and Mail