The Florestine Collection

Year2010 Duration31 min. DirectorPaul Gailiunas, Helen Hill WriterPaul Gailiunas, Helen Hill PhotographyHelen Hill, Mar Elepano, Paul Gailiunas EditorPaul Gailiunas SoundFausto Caceres

Optical Printing: Alfonso Alvarez

Festivals

2011 Ann Arbor Film Festival, The Flood of Love Award
2011 DOXA Film Festival (Vancouver), Best Short Documentary Award
2011 Ann Arbor Film Festival Film Tour
2012 Flaherty Seminar, "On the Road Program" Film Tour
2012, Crossroads Film Festival (Jackson, Mississippi), Best Short Documentary Film Award

Spanish premiere

Experimental Animator Helen Hill found more than 100 handmade dresses in a trash pile on one Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans. She set out to make a film about the dressmaker, an elderly seamstress who had recently passed away. The dresses and much of the film footage were later flood-damaged by Hurricane Katrina while Helen was still working on the film. Helen was murdered in a home invasion in New Orleans in 2007. Her husband Paul Gailiunas has completed the film, which includes Helen''s original silhouette, cut-out, and puppet animation, as well as flood-damaged and restored home movies.

Paul Gailiunas, Helen Hill

Helen Hill

Helen Hill (1970-2007) was a filmmaker and activist raised in Columbia, South Carolina and settled in New Orleans, Louisiana. She studied Experimental Animation at Harvard and California Institute of the Arts. She taught film workshops wherever she went, and compiled Recipes For Disaster: A Film Cookbooklet. Helen championed low-budget and do-it-yourself approaches to filmmaking, including super 8, handprocessing, and drawing-on-film, and insisted that “you don't need to keep up with the latest technology to make a good film, you just need a good idea.”

Paul Gailiunas

Paul Gailiunas is a family doctor who works in Pasadena, California. He spent three and a half years following Helen's death completing The Florestine Collection.