Kier-La Janisse
VISION
Pre-production Grant
Funds will be used to help fund an animation test.
About the project: An animated short based on Julia Gfrörer’s acclaimed graphic novel (Fantagraphics 2020), Vision explores lust, grief, and the human need for connection in this story of a 19th century spinster and the haunted mirror that offers an escape from her frustrated life.
About the filmmakers: Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, programmer, publisher, producer and founder of The Miskatonic Institute of Horror Studies. She is the author of A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012) and has been an editor on several books including Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015) and Yuletide Terror: Christmas Horror on Film and Television (2017). She was a producer on Mike Malloy’s Eurocrime: The Italian Cop and Gangster Films That Ruled the ’70s (2012) and David Gregory’s Tales of the Uncanny (2020), and is currently co-editing an anthology book on the films of Robert Downey, Sr., writing a monograph about Monte Hellman’s Cockfighter and in post-production on a partially-animated short film about indie rock iconoclast Wreckless Eric. Her first feature as writer/director/producer, Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror won The Midnighters Audience Award at SXSW 2021.
Currently based in Los Angeles, Fritzi Adelman spent over a decade living in Montreal and Toronto where she studied art and cinema (BFA Art History / MA Film Studies) and worked professionally at leading fashion companies and film at festivals (Fantasia International Film Festival, Pop Montreal and TIFF). Making her way westward, she landed in the Bay Area, where she joined director Joe Talbot’s production company Longshot Features – the Sundance Award winning team that created A24 / Plan B’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco – and continues to work as one of Talbot’s closest collaborators. She is also set to produce Canadian director Noam Gonick’s Amber (set to go into production Spring, 2021) – a hybrid-documentary based on a true story of a double kidnapping which explores the Indigenous male experience, trauma and memory.