Giovanna Ferrari tells me how people used to call her a strange child when she was younger. She recalls both adults and other kids making fun of her and her interests. It’s also what informed her latest Oscar shortlisted short, Éiru. "I remember that it happened a lot, and sometimes it really hurt," she says. "I think I wanted to have a character that adults make fun of, but she's actually right. She's the one who's right."
Éiru is a thirteen-minute animated film that follows a girl who isn’t taken seriously by her clan of Iron Age warriors because she’s too small. But when the village well runs dry, her size gives her an advantage. Ferrari uses her film to answer a specific question: Why do we keep dismissing the people who see what we can’t? But to really understand the answer to that question, you’d need to understand Ferrari’s own lived experience.
As an Italian expat who raised her daughter while moving across various European countries, Ferrari is very familiar with the friction of being "othered." She remembers leaving Italy in her twenties and seeing a unique kind of hypocrisy around her. The same people who celebrated her ambition in going away were often the ones who resented the arrival of others. "I still remember how the people celebrating my ambition were also the same people who were unhappy that other people would come to Italy and work there," she says. "I couldn’t understand how those two things could coexist in the same person."
As a young woman in rooms historically dominated by men, Ferrari frequently wondered if her own identity was a liability to her success. "For a long time, I was questioning myself and how I should behave. Was I supposed to try to be like them? Being myself as a girl was not necessarily something that was accepted. In the best case scenario, I was made fun of. There were other situations that were very uncomfortable, so what could I do with myself?"
Eventually she realized there was no clean answer to that struggle. The only viable response was a relentless commitment to the quest itself. "The commitment, not giving up, and continuing your quest is the answer, I guess. One of the answers."
When she had her daughter, Ferrari’s perspective evolved even furhter. "The moment that I had her, I started to realize that children are humans. They are like adults. Their ideas, their thoughts, and their opinions are really important, and I really don’t understand how people can dismiss them," she explains. She believes that children reveal things about the adults around them, and that the goal of parenting is to create a person who is able to tell you that you are wrong. "And you should listen when they do."
After she tells me about this belief, Ferrari talks about the nature of time. She believes that children are not bound by the limits of adulthood, nor are they corrupted by the same limitations that we face. She even suggests that children’s innocence allows them to break the limits of time because they have not yet been taught to live within its linear constraints. "I think that sometimes they even can warp the sense of time because they don’t understand time," she says, referencing the film Arrival. "My experience with my daughter was to see somebody who knew things that hadn't happened yet because she didn’t know the difference between past and future. If you really look at kids, they behave like that. They defy the imposition that we teach them later on because they don't have them yet. Time is something that doesn't exist or apply to them."
Ferrari sees the Earth as a living witness to human failure, linking the exploitation of land directly to the treatment of minorities and women. "That was the center of the movie for me: the connection between what we do to minorities, women, children, and the Earth," she says. "It’s this idea that we own things around us. That we are here, and we own people, we own land, we own everything."
The film offers its morality in color: above ground, the clans move through aggressive, angular shapes colored by hard reds and yellows that Ferrari describes as "potential weapons." Below ground, the world is a soft, blue network of mycelium that represents the internal soul of the planet. When the violence of the clans above ground bleeds into the earth, Ferrari uses the color of their war to inflict visual damage on the soil. The blue roots turn "red and edgy," a symbol of what war does to the soil. She wrote the script in the immediate shadow of the invasion of Ukraine, haunted by the stories her grandparents told her about surviving fascist occupation and concentration camps. "It’s a very scary world. It’s really, really scary, and the thought that we haven’t learned from the past terrifies me," she admits. "The city I come from liberated itself from the Nazis after one of the worst winters. It’s very physically scary."
Despite the state of the world, she finds comfort in the art world. "If I actually think about how it was to be young in the 90s, we are so ahead now," she says. "We have learned so many things as a civilization. In the way we talk about each other, the way we respect women, and the way we respect minorities. I know there's a lot of crap going on, but there's also a lot of very good stuff. I don’t want to forget the good stuff because I’m too scared and only looking at the bad."
Ferrari eventually discovered that her own “strangeness” was her greatest asset. Working on Song of The Sea she realised that being so close to her young daughter allowed her to animate Saoirse in a very personal way and that was appreciated by the supervisor and the director. “I was actually being valued for something that had been seen as a problem by others before. That’s when I decided I wanted to work again for Cartoon Saloon”
She made Éiru because she remembered being the child adults laughed at. Éiru is about setting aside your biases and learning to listen to different voices. "It’s just a matter of getting the hell out of our houses, getting the hell out of our phones, and go meet other people and do stuff together," she concludes. "Life is too short not to do it, and it really gives you hope and very good vibes."