Mother Tongue
2:38 mins
United States of America
Feb 1, 2025
In Competition
Mother Tongue explores the routine, overwhelmingly choice-based task of grocery shopping, accompanied by a voiceover that weaves the artist's themes and voice into non-traditional animation. In this film, the artist navigates her intricate relationship with language as an intergenerational struggle, covering the old with the shiny new replacing linguistic rhythms with static words. Mother Tongue is an apology and an explanation and an exploration. Most of all, Mother Tongue is the story of a new generation.
Directors | Shriya Surana |
|---|---|
Writer & Producer | Shriya Surana |
About
Shriya Surana
Shriya Surana is an emerging animator and director whose work explores the boundaries between 2D non-fiction animation and tactile stop motion. Preferring handmade methods over digital automation, she often creates her animations using cut-outs from her own drawings or sculpted clay elements, embracing imperfection and process as central parts of her artistic voice.
Her films draw inspiration from research, conversation, and material experimentation. In her recent work, including Mother Tongue (2025), she investigates themes of language and cultural identity through interviews and visual abstraction. Surana’s creative practice reflects her fascination with physical media—old photographs, decayed film, and textures marked by time—which she manipulates to reveal beauty in deterioration.
Guided by curiosity and introspection, Surana sees animation as a living dialogue between thought and movement. She encourages new artists to look beyond mainstream studios and rediscover animation as the simple, profound study of motion in all its forms.