Jiwoo Kim

Cowman

COWMAN is my debut film, which I have been working on since my third year of school. Through school, I met many amazing people, and my professor, Ryan Von Hagen, encouraged and supported me throughout the years. Upon graduating, I was able to secure grants from Calgary Arts Development and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and I feel extremely lucky to have received this support.

After receiving the grants, I immediately rented a studio space at Quickdraw Animation Society. It was there that I met many talented and inspiring animators. COWMAN had its world premiere at GIRAF 21 (Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival), hosted by Quickdraw in November 2025. It will also have its international premiere at the Kaboom Animation Festival in March 2026, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

COWMAN is not just a silly animation; it represents my dedication and marks my debut as a professional emerging animator. This film was only made possible through the support of an incredible community, generous mentors, and my own family. At its core, COWMAN represents love and the act of sharing that love with others.

Laila Blue

FLOW

FLOW explores the dark and surreal world of the beauty industry through stop-motion, animation, and live-action.

I’m drawn to mixing unsettling surrealism with satire, especially when it comes to topics that make people uncomfortable, like beauty culture, trauma, or consumerism. Humour is a survival tool, and I often use it to explore the darker sides of how we live, cope, and present ourselves. My work blends media—live-action, stop-motion, animation—because I like the chaos and texture that comes from layering different forms together. I’m interested in what’s hidden beneath the surface, how people perform identity, and how systems shape us.

As a female BIPOC director, I’m especially passionate about creating narratives through a female lens we don’t often get to see—stories that feel emotionally strange, raw, or dreamlike, but still grounded in lived experience. Whether I’m acting, writing, or directing, I want to make work that lingers, like a dream you half-remember.

Maedeh (Mayi) Mosaver
Holding the Moment 

2025-26
Watercolour and digital drawing frame-by-frame animation
Music: Forgot10

Holding the Moment is a short, non-narrative, hand-drawn animation that reflects on slowing down, observation, and reconnection with the living world. Composed of moments drawn from the artist’s everyday encounters with nature and captured instinctively rather than intentionally, the film emerges from periods of pause and re-centring within overwhelming social and environmental systems. Through watercolour and digital drawing, the work treats attention as an act of care and quiet resistance, inviting viewers to linger, notice, and consider alternative rhythms of being. Holding the Moment offers hope through presence, repetition, and the simple practice of staying with what is already around us.

Fun fact: All of the plants you see in the animation are my house plants