Choir of love
an animation by Libby Hague
HD animation, 19:01
Life, like film, moves forward.  We either carry our complicated past and our loves forward inside ourselves or they're gone. It's our big gamble on the future.           

Set on the Aran island of Inisheer, Choir of love conflates the ideas of leaving for a new world and leaving this world. The central metaphor is traveling across the sea, young people looking for opportunity and for love, and old people saying goodbye, a beginning and an ending. Both departures are connected to the death of the filmmaker's father.            

Some situations are too difficult to tackle directly.   Choir of love uses analogy and structural interconnections; each scene illuminates the next; a personal acceptance shows a way to reconciliation - to where Ireland, astonishingly, seems to have arrived.            

Choir of love combines animation, puppets and digital effects. The text is written by the artist, with selected late poems by Yeats.

thanks to Alan Geldart for sound design
Pauline Cummins for her reading of Yeats' poems + Yeats for writing them
Madi Piller + TAIS
Mireille Bourgeois + CFAT
Canadian music performed by Steafan Hannigan + Saskia Tomkins
Irish recordings of young musicians from Feis Rois 
Mairéad Ní Ghallchóir + Danny Kirrane + Áras Éanna
Avery McNair - Irish dancing
Maureen Galligan, dancing teacher BFOC
Jennifer Maramba 
Yael Brotman 
Philip Anisman 
Ross + Betty Hague