OLIVIA & THE CLOUDS — co-presented by El Cine

In conjunction with PRS’s monthlong lecture series Through Mirrors, Webs, & Woods: A Month of Folk & Fairy Tales, 7th House welcomes El Cine as they present Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat’s extraordinary feature debut, OLIVIA & THE CLOUDS (2024)—only the third animated feature ever produced in the Dominican Republic and, as Pichardo-Espaillat himself puts it, the country’s first “2D and artisanally produced” full-length animated film.

Ten years in the making and created by a local team of Dominican animators, Olivia & the Clouds unfolds as a surreal, shape-shifting tale of love, heartbreak, memory, and desire. Olivia keeps the ghost of a former lover beneath her bed, exchanging flowers with him for rain clouds; Ramón remembers Olivia as a plant growing inside his apartment; Barbara follows a broken heart into an elaborate world of fantasy, while Mauricio’s remorse takes an altogether more elemental turn as the earth threatens to swallow him whole. Drawing inspiration from the fractured subjectivity of Kurosawa’s Rashomon, Ingmar Bergman’s psychological explorations of love and intimacy, and the magical realism of Haruki Murakami, Pichardo-Espaillat filters the messy realities of adult relationships through the elemental language of dreams and fairy tales, where memories assume new forms, desire takes root and grows, and heartbreak can transform the very world around those who experience it.

As mercurial in form as it is in memory, Olivia & the Clouds moves through a dazzling array of techniques—hand-drawn animation, clay stop-motion, cut-outs, rotoscoping, live-action footage, and more—its visual language seemingly transforming before our eyes. Pichardo-Espaillat brought together Dominican animators with radically different approaches, treating their individual styles almost as performances to be shaped into a larger whole. The result is an endlessly inventive, tactile work in which interior states continually take physical form, reveling in the seemingly limitless possibilities of the medium and announcing Pichardo-Espaillat as a truly unique new voice in contemporary filmmaking.

Following an acclaimed international festival run beginning at Locarno and earning a Special Mention in the First Feature Competition at the BFI London Film Festival, 7th House and El Cine are thrilled to bring Olivia & the Clouds to PRS.

Dir. Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat, 2024, 81 mins, Dominican Republic, Spanish w/ English Subtitles. Unrated, Digital.

Tickets: $10 (All Screenings Are In Person Only)

Please email events@prs.org or phone 323-663-2167 with any questions.