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Three Miami area artists of different disciplines combined their creative talents to produce a short animated film titled Light. Created out of the uncertainty caused by the global pandemic shutdown of 2021, the film was put together by Oscar Fuentes, known as “The Biscayne Poet,” Belinda Niling Stohner of the string quartet Baby B Strings, and artist/animator Karla Caprali.
It already has been screened around the world, at The London Film Festival; Berlin Art Film Festival; The Serlachius Gallery in Mänta, Finland, and The Miami Short Film Festival. It was recognized with an “Audience Award” at the London Film Festival and is part of the Miami Film Festival schedule at Silverspot Cinema.
“Light centers on the life of a Hispanic poet who comes face to face with Lady Death, who pursues him everywhere he goes, eventually leaving him incapable of discerning life from death,” said Stohner, a professional violinist born and raised in Kansas but living in Miami for nearly 20 years. “Inspired by Maya Deren’s movie, Meshes of the Afternoon, Lady Death is both a literal and metaphorical interpretation of the cessation of life due to illness or natural causes.”
Stohner and Fuentes had previously worked together on several projects, one with Baby B Strings performing Musical Fairytales at the library, where Fuentes is the library exhibitions and programming specialist.
“I knew Belinda and Karla separately,” Fuentes said. “I had only collaborated with Belinda, but not with Karla. When Belinda approached me about adding my poetry to one of her music projects, we both realized we have something special in our hands, and that we needed to perhaps add a filmmaker or an animator to the mix, and Karla Caprali was my first choice to contact. The rest is history.”
Caprali, an artist, illustrator and animator born and raised in Brazil but now a Miami resident, has been creating mixed-media installations, textile art, handcrafted short animation films and music videos in collaboration with local and international musicians and poets for roughly 20 years.
“Combining visuals and sounds together can be challenging,” Caprali said. “It took me several months to craft the right images but also I had to write my own script and make a storyboard prior to animating. Every second of the sound needs to match so I had to calculate how many scenes would fit in every 10 seconds.”
Stohner’s string quartet is known for finding creative ways to include string music in people’s lives, sometimes collaborating with other artists, poets and musicians, and other times performing in unexpected places like hospitals, libraries, or homeless shelters. They also play non-classical music, like rock, jazz and tangos.
“I sent Oscar a bunch of recordings from Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite written by Modest Mussorgsky,” Stohner said. “Each movement of the piece was inspired by a painting or piece of art by his good friend Victor Hartmann, who had died. The collection was originally written for piano, but Maurice Ravel’s orchestral version is probably more famous than the piano version. I have always loved that piece, so much that I arranged it for my string quartet. Almost immediately Oscar sent back little voice recordings he made on his phone of him reciting poetry that he’d written over the music, and I think we both knew we had something special.”
Stohner credits Fuentes with the idea of making a video with it and suggesting Caprali.
“Having my poem and my voice on the project is a humbling honor,” Fuentes said. “I feel without even trying, the three of us bring to this creative project a perfect storm of artistic collaboration. It almost feels to me that we had to spend our lives separately working and maturing our own crafts to arrive at this opportunity feeling ready, knowing in our gut that this was the right combo.”
A trailer and scheduling information can be found at www.babybstrings.com/light and the Miami Film Festival program guide is at https://miamifilmfestival.com/festival/.
