Pea Story

Animation Canada 2015 English 0:01:58

How do you tell the story of a sister who’s profoundly disabled and doesn’t have a voice to say whether or not they want that story told? If you’re filmmaker Kirsten Johnson, you invent a unique method of storytelling by animating a Raggedy Ann doll who stands in for the absent sister. Exploring the unknowable with humour, depth….and lots of peas.

Kirsten Johnson, based in Toronto, comes to film via a strong background as a painter and performer. Her paintings appear in private and public collections all over the world. As an actor she has worked with directors Jeremy Podeswa, David Cronenberg and once was Ophelia in an infamous 8 hour DNA Theatre production of Hamlet. She turned to filmmaking as a way to fuse these different practices.
Her films have been shown at the Weiterstadt Film Festival, Montréal’s International Festival of Films on Art, the Female Eye Festival and Peterborough’s International Reframe Festival among others.
Whether making films, acting or painting she puts an emphasis on intellectual curiosity, emotional empathy and humour