A woman’s touch

The bill includes Emma Lazenby’s Bafta-winning Mother of Many, made in honour of her mother, who served 30 years as a midwife. Emotive, beautiful, painful and featuring sounds of real births, at under six minutes the film is as tantalisingly short as childbirth is arduously long.

Julia Potts’ Howard is the story of a bear who cannot quite commit to her human boyfriend, who often wears a hood with bear ears on it presumably to be more like her. Meanwhile, Hyebin Lee’s accomplished work Cherry on the Cake shows a child shrinking to an inch high after feeling ignored by her family on her birthday.

One of the more commercial works is George Wu’s music video for Ill Ease’s Here Comes Trouble. Created using puppetry and with a home-made, Flight of the Conchords-style aesthetic, it tells the story of a clothes peg trying to find gainful employment.

’We didn’t want to ghetto-ise women in one programme, so there is still work by women in the rest of the Onedotzero festival as well, but we have found in previous years that relatively few female directors submit films to us,’ says Ladymation curator Claire Spencer Cook. ’This year we wanted to big-up female animators by showing quality work leading the way in animation.’

To view some of the films, visit www. designweek.co.uk/features.

Ladymation, part of Onedotzero’s Adventures in Motion festival, plays at London’s BFI Southbank on Thursday 11 November at 8.45, Saturday 13 November at 8.50 and 14 November at 2.10