Artist   &    Social Activist

Short BIO

Françoise Doherty is a Canadian experimental filmmaker, artist and composer who creates worlds at the intersection of light, music and image. Shooting with 35mm still photography for most of her film/video work, her career encompasses stop motion animation, film, music, video and drawing. She is a filmmaker who creates work for social change and child/youth protection, appealing at times to young children as well as the art-literate. Françoise Doherty has been creating stories for over 20 years and is actively involved in education.  Although she has lived within many areas of Canada as well as the west coast of the U.S., she presently lives in Kingston, Ontario, a small Canadian city. She received two Audience Choice Awards: Montreal Canada's Festival Image + Nation and for Cinéffable in Paris, France. She has an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles county, California. 

Reasons

She chose stop motion animation specifically as a medium to give her a stronger voice as a social activist. Inspired by Art Spiegelman's Maus, she uses non-human stop motion characters to relay an important message. Such as the absolute acceptance regarding young children and all people that being LGBTQ+ is a matter of the heart. It also gave her the ability to discuss the intimate repercussions of rape for a girl and her family with an allowance for recovery and societal change. Her present film Ode is a neurodiverse film that brings to light other rich forms of communication. It is a film that finds the pinnacle of humanness in the absence of the human. It is minimalist at its core (there are no words and no characters). Françoise's evolution into non-verbal filmmaking allowed her to find what makes us human. In the absence of words, she shows us ourselves.

Social Activist

LGBTQ+  children

She is a trailblazer in queer activism for young children with her animated series "The Girl Bunnies" about a world of queer rabbits (four films, 2007-2016). "The Girl Bunnies HOCKEY" was screened at Pride House in The Olympic Village during the 2010 Winter Olympics. The films have been screened in festivals in 21 countries and have been played in numerous primary classrooms. All of the primary characters in the Girl Bunnies films are queer: lesbian, gay, transgender, and non-binary.

Sexual Assault Awareness

Her non-verbal animated film The Story Of Ice (2020) is an intimate look into the repercussions of sexual assault and how we as a society can heal. There is no dialogue because sometimes things are too big for words. The horrific yet magical tale is full of hope.

Neurodiversity

Françoise's evolution into non-verbal filmmaking allowed her to find what makes us human. In the absence of words, she shows us ourselves. Her films speak to the core of her autism; they are stories created with symbolic imagery where objects take on greater meaning to relay the story. Her past two films, Ode and The Story Of Ice, are non-verbal. As a child at school, she was classified as selective-mute and then began the slow and partial integration of a non-verbal world with a verbal world.