UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State theatre faculty member Bill Doan’s animated short film, “Sticks and Stones,” continues to rack up the honors. It was recently accepted to the New York Mental Health Film Festival, was nominated for “Best Animated Film” at the Cannes Shorts Festival, and received a Creativity Award from the A Show For A Change Film Festival. The film was previously accepted to 11 other festivals and received several awards, including winner of the 2022 Art with Impact Short Film Competition.
Directed by Cynthia White and Alexander White with original drawings by Doan, director of the Arts and Design Research Incubator at Penn State, the film explores his relationship with his stepfather and reveals that the idea of masculinity he was exposed to as a young boy fueled his depression and anxiety.
It is Doan’s second film produced as part of his “Anxiety Project,” through which he shares his story using visual and performance art. Since its inception in 2018, the project has yielded more than 800 drawings and two original performance pieces, in addition to two films (“Sticks and Stones” and “Inhale, Exhale, Draw”). Doan presented around the commonwealth as Penn State Laureate during the 2019-20 academic year.
Doan and the production team that worked on his first two films recently completed “Frontline Nurses: Dispatches from the COVID-19 Pandemic,” which is now being entered in film festivals.