When Ponds Freeze Over

A mother tells her child a story of skating when she was a 16-year-old girl. Her father falls through the ice, and in an effort to save him, she also goes through. As she struggles to get out, she swims in visually stunning and vibrant dreams of animated memories and family stories - a singular history of particular places and times on Newfoundland´s Avalon Peninsula. As memories and the memory of memories unfold, the narrator tells us of forgotten things. This vivid and exuberant film is an innovative blend of narrative and documentary. It uses a combination of live-action dramatic footage and various styles of animation. The film is concerned foremost with memory - individual and collective. The filmmaker says she wants her film to serve as a kind of antidote to the whittling away of family histories in her home province. Between the death of the fishery and the pull of globalization, Newfoundland is emptying out faster than ever before, and this raises the danger that whole oral histories and family narratives will be lost. If public television does not tell these stories, who will?