Faculty of Art

Experimental Animation

Catalina Auguste

Dear, Dad

An eleven-year-old girl reads a letter to her father, revealing the quiet pain of growing up between love and the fear of never being enough. Years later, she revisits those words, confronting memory, trauma, the two women who helped her through it, and the long path toward healing.

“Dear, Dad is a 2D mixed-media animated short that tells a very personal story. In it, I read a letter that I once wrote to my dad as an 11-year-old child. A letter where I tried to explain how I felt, and why I didn’t want to live with him anymore while my parents had shared custody. This was a significant letter coming from such a young child. While I didn’t have the words back then that I do now, this letter was written from a place of needing to be heard. The film explores my childhood journey to navigate a lot of confusing emotions: fear, guilt, and loving someone but also feeling hurt by them at the same time.Returning to these memories nearly twelve years later has been overwhelming at times, but it has also allowed me to see both the pain and resilience of my younger self. This project is also a quiet love letter to my mom and my grandma, the women in my life who gave me the care, emotional safety, and strength I needed to survive that time. They were my anchors, the figures who helped me find stability and hope when it felt like everything else was uncertain. Including them in this work reminds me, and anyone watching, that even in dark times, love can hold and protect us.A big part of creating this film was finding old photos and videos of me to incorporate into it. I wanted the film to feel physically layered, experimentally cut, and glued together to represent the different pieces of my and my memories in this story. I purposefully chose more saturated colours to represent the memories as a way to contrast the less saturated feel of the words being spoken over the piece. I experimented with collage animation, inspired by pieces like I Would’ve Been Happy by Jordan Wong and SUPERCUT by Zuzu, as well as with incorporating live footage into a predominantly 2D project.My hope is that when viewers watch this film, they can understand the feeling of being unheard, or the weight of carrying heavy emotions at a young age.Working on this piece helped me to find a sense of peace within myself by finally sitting with my past, acknowledging it, and finding the strength to keep moving forward, despite it all. This film is about honesty, connection, and the courage to revisit your own story. It’s about giving a voice to little Catalina, honouring the people who saved me, and creating something that others can feel, relate to, and carry with them too.”