Window Horses

100 minutes

A poignant tale about a young woman who travels to Iran for a poetry festival.

Window Horses

Window Horses, a poignant feature from Canadian filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, tells the story of Rosie Ming, a naïve young woman of mixed descent who travels abroad for the first time, to a poetry festival in Iran. Through this awkward experience, Rosie discovers the world, her family and herself. Window Horses is a touching tale that traces the pain, confusion and wonder of visiting one of the most vibrating and fascinating countries on Earth.  

Raouf Alaia will be reciting a poem before the screening of the film in Eye, He was born in Shiraz, in a poetic & artistic family of Nomadic decent. He moved to Europe with his family in his teenage years. Since the age of 5, he has been involved with classical Persian literature and writing his own poetry in Farsi & later in English. In the past years he has been experimenting with his literary work through film & performance, commonly based on spiritual & psychological contemplation.

This program screened as part of Kaboom Animation Festival 2023

Showing in this program

Window Horses

Window Horses

  • Ann Marie Fleming
  • Canada, 2016
  • 89 min.

Written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Ann Marie Fleming, Window Horses is a feature animation about love—love of family, poetry, history, culture.

Rosie Ming, a young Canadian poet, is invited to perform at a poetry festival in Shiraz, Iran, but she’d rather go to Paris. She lives at home with her over-protective Chinese grandparents and has never been anywhere by herself. Once in Iran, she finds herself in the company of poets and Persians who tell her stories that force her to confront her past: the Iranian father she assumed abandoned her and the nature of poetry itself. The film is about building bridges between cultural and generational divides. It’s about being curious. Staying open. And finding your own voice through the magic of poetry.

The film’s voice actors include Sandra Oh (Rosie), Ellen Page (Kelly, Rosie’s best friend), Don McKellar (a young poet named Dietmar), Shohreh Aghdashloo (Mehrnaz, a professor at the University of Tehran) and Nancy Kwan (Gloria, Rosie’s overprotective grandmother). More than a dozen animators, including Kevin Langdale, Janet Perlman, Bahram Javaheri and Jody Kramer, worked on the film with Fleming.

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