The 2024 Helen Hill Award goes to Jeremy Rourke

Every other year, the Orphan Film Symposium confers its Helen Hill Award to an exceptional independent filmmaker whose work befits the late artist’s legacy, celebrating creativity, collaboration, animation, and things made by hand. This year we recognize media artist/animator/musician/performer Jeremy Rourke.

Preview his work at jeremyrourke.com, his Vimeo page, and Instagram @jeremy.rourke.
But his is a live cinema practice.

As part of “Orphans 2024: Work & Play,” Rourke will screen his work and perform original music with the projections at Museum of the Moving Image, April 10-13. The NYU Orphan Film Symposium brings together an international audience of archivists, artists, scholars, curators, and other enthusiasts of previously neglected films. Attendance is open to anyone who registers.

The Helen Hill Award is conferred jointly by NYU Cinema Studies and the University of South Carolina Film and Media Studies program. Laura Kissel at USC sent official word about the jury’s selection. Jeremy’s “animated films are enlivened by song and performance and feel like a great fit for Orphans and the theme. His films connect to Helen’s legacy because they are spirited and humorous, playful, musical, and beautiful!” Her fellow co-founder of the symposium, Susan Courtney, concurred: “On top of their incredible creativity, musicality, exuberant stop-motion animation, super smart yet heartfelt content, and straight up beauty, these films made us so happy!!!”

Filmmaker Sasha Waters, 2016 awardee, finds the San Francisco-based Rourke deserving “based on the humor, beauty and pathos of his unique artistic voice AND his deep community engagement rooted in place and the history of independent cinema. His love letter to Craig Baldwin and Artists’ Television Access was particularly moving — and such an important reminder of the scrappy DIY energy and LOVE that still survive in San Francisco.” Helen Hill would have “truly delighted in the care and craft at the heart of Rourke’s films.”

Indeed one of the productions to be screened in April is You’re Not Listening, a variable-length homage to the archivist/artist/activist’s collection of 16mm film prints and his Other Cinema screening space.

frame from You're Not Listening — In performance with “*You’re Not Listening.”*

Asked to comment on this year’s honoree, Craig Baldwin responded today with characteristic verve.

Jeremy Rourke appears as a magickal blessing..boyish and energized, the sprite who, guitar in hand, leaps from gallery pedestal to pedestal, and lo!..never falls. His animation is a like delight, never fails to gladden the heart and the eye. As with laughter, it breathes briskly with its hand-made charm..his work is a win over time and space for us poor humans.

Other symposium screenings will include Lyrics on Paper (made with images retrieved from the waste stream / garbage of San Francisco) and his work-in-progress Flower Tower.

Applicants are asked why their work matches the award’s criteria. Jeremy wrote:

There are so many human beings (Helen Hill included) whose artwork I am indebted to. Hands reach out to pull us over boulders on this artistic path. The beat goes on! I have been honored to share the craft of animation with kinders and adults, and am currently teaching animation at Saint Mary’s College of California. Animation keeps us rooted in the hand-made, analog, ground-level, textured, and tactile reality of being alive. My personal and collaborative projects include music videos, a documentary about AIDS activist Hank Wilson, an anti-bullying documentary [Jay Rosenblatt’s Oscar-nominated When We Were Bullies (2021)], a P.S.A. for the Roxie Theater, and an homage to ATA, the artist run film collective in SF, where I cut my teeth (frame by frame).

from Lyrics on Paper.