5 Awards!!

Thrilled to announce that the animated short film Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town, the latest work by the talented director Daniel Kreizberg, has won five awards at the Apollo Film Festival in Martinsburg, West Virginia:

Short film/ second place
Best edition
Sound Design
Original Music
Writing

“Anyone Lived in a Pretty How Town” had its world premiere at the Savannah Film Festival and has since been competing in the official selection at numerous prestigious international film festivals, including Hollywood Oscar qualifying festivals.

Director Statement

In the American poet E.E. Cummings’ widely beloved poem anyone lived in a pretty how town, the primary characters anyone and no one transcend their cynical community to develop a profound love relationship. Spanning many years and life cycles, this meditation on ordinary lives and overlooked connections has had great meaning to me since I first encountered it a decade ago. Initially published amidst global upheaval in 1940, its post-modern critiques of social conformity and industrialization feel even more relevant today, when both our public discourse and our private lives are facing remarkable challenges.

In recent years, I discovered that Cummings’ lyrical elegy has deep resonances with a piece of music that is very personal to me: my late father’s final recording. Yakov Kreizberg was a renowned maestro and died of a long illness at age 51 when I was only a teenager. His last recorded work, the much-performed Ralph Vaughan Williams tone poem The Lark Ascending, was called “perhaps the finest on record” (ClassicFM) after he performed it with the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra, roughly 100 days before passing away, in what is now the Yakov Kreizberg Hall. While the music’s romantic sensibilities are as apparent as its nature themes, the work originated during the First World War, and heard alongside the Cummings poem, expresses both the ecstasy of the spirit as well as life’s storms and challenges. Incredibly, and almost mystically, each musical line seems to support each line of the poem, in a symbiosis that is beyond words.

After discovering E.E. Cummings’ own paintings, which are dreamy, almost fragile oil and watercolors and which are an often overlooked part of his artistic legacy, I became convinced that the transporting world of his perhaps most widely anthologized poem had to be brought to life in the poignant style of his visual art. Together with the STUDIO and Meinart Animation Studio, we spent eighteen months meticulously crafting animation in which every frame contains the feel of an artist’s hand. Furthermore, my father’s music evokes vivid colors that lend themselves perfectly to the impressionistic paint colors Cummings favored. And, inspired by the nature themes inherent in both the poem and the music, Cummings’ words are given gripping resonance through a reading by legendary ethologist and conservationist Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, whose tender voice lends gravity to Cummings’ work and suggests that new human and social values are needed for our own well-being and a sustainable planet.

Collaborating with my father on this film, across the seeming boundary of life and death, is the realization of an impossible dream, perhaps best articulated by Cummings’ own words in the poem: “wish by spirit and if by yes.” Ultimately, our film is about that which is everlasting: the lives we touch, the impact we have on the world, the legacies we leave behind. Our protagonist embodies the fundamental humanity found within any one of us, while The Lark Ascending celebrates the eternal spirit we all carry, one which yearns to soar and be free if only we will let it.

May anyone lead the way.

– Daniel Kreizberg, director of anyone lived in a pretty how town