Jenna Caravello premiered Vimar at Edinburgh's film festival
A games-native animator, associate director of UCLA's Game Lab, cleared one of cinema's oldest showcases with two haunted minutes about a swan.
Two of the shortest minutes at the 79th Edinburgh International Film Festival belonged to a man having a violent daydream about a swan. Vimar, a 3D-animated short by Jenna Caravello, world-premiered in the festival's Animation Shorts program—EIFF ran August 13 through 19—and the announcement is worth reading for who made the film as much as for what it is.
Vimar onscreen at the Edinburgh premiere, from the announcement. Silent loop.
Caravello teaches in UCLA's Design Media Arts department and serves as associate director of the UCLA Game Lab—Killscreen toured the lab in 2021—and works across animation, performance, installation, and computer games. The films come out of the same well as the games: digital impermanence, avatar identity, the social afterlives of virtual spaces.
Vimar itself is not out yet—Caravello's site lists it as coming soon—but the festival run is only starting: the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology has the film in this year's lineup. Caravello has crossed Killscreen's path before, too; the solo show Easy Ultra Fine ran at Killscreen Gallery in Los Angeles in 2024. The through-line from that 2021 Game Lab visit still holds: the people building games at UCLA were never only building games. Now a film festival has agreed onstage.
The program, the post-screening Q&A, and Edinburgh itself, from Caravello’s carousel.
Game-lab animators clearing film festivals is exactly the border traffic Killscreen exists to log. The free newsletter delivers each crossing as it happens.
