Tess Martin: Ginevra

Based on Percy Shelley’s Poem The Dirge (itself based on the Florentine urban legend of Ginevra degli Almieri, who is rumored to have woken up a full day after her supposed death), Ginevra tells the tale of a woman mourning the murder of her daughter, only to find that the death is not quite the ending that she expected. Though technically unfinished upon Shelley’s untimely death, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (author of Frankenstein) published the last completed segment of the poem in 1824, allowing the mysteries of its meaning and the ambiguities of an untold ending to live on in the public consciousness.

This film is part of a series of short animations based on poetry called Cinematic Campfire Poetry, supported by the IFP Screen Forward Lab and produced by Monticello Park Productions. Director Tess Martin wrote the film to fit the poem, and animated it using paper cut-outs on a multi-plane animation stand, one frame at a time.