Ten years ago, Igor Kenk bought a property on Queen Street West in Toronto for $85,000. But since then the area has developed and his lot is now valued at $700,000.
“So in that time where he didn’t stand out, now, you had doggy outfitters, you had Starbucks. . . and then you had his place,” said Alex Jansen, producer of KENK, an animated short based on the life of notorious bicycle thief Igor Kenk. The short was presented at a combined event for Ottawa International Animation Festival (OIAF) and Ottawa International Writers Festival (OIWF) Oct. 23.
He described the shop: The window had been completely shattered out a several years earlier and in its place was a metal sheet scrawled with chalk. Bicycles were piled high in heaps and spilled out onto the sidewalk.
The short illustrates the life of Kenk during the year leading up to his arrest for charges related to theft and drug possession after police seized over 3,000 stolen bicycles from his bike shop.
Its director, Jason Gilmore, said that the KENK team decided to make a short because of the interest in the graphic novel, KENK: A Graphic portrait.
“We’ve got people’s eyes and we’ve got people’s attention,” Gilmore said in an interview at the Library Archives following the KENK presentation with producer Alex Jansen, illustrator Nik Marenkovich and animation director Craig Small.
Gilmore said that the experimental animation approach has never been done before.
Each frame of the animation was made from a black and white photocopy of documentary footage, which was then crumpled and its creases etched iwith a knife. Next, Small creates a 3D collage with newspaper clippings.
Small said that he drew said that he drew a lot of influence from FV Disco, a punk revival in Slovenia, Kenk’s home country.
While this is a new venture in animation, KENK is foremost a piece of journalism. Gilmore said the writer, Richard Poplak embraced new mediums while still following the New Yorker style of profiles.
“His approach to this was to transform journalism to push the boundaries of traditional journalism,” said Gilmore.
Chris Robinson, the artistic director of the OIAF, said that animation and writing always go hand in hand. This was the first official collaboration between the festivals but he says there has often been an overlap as he has panelled for the writer’s festival before.
Robinson, a Carleton film studies graduate, said that because he brings a different critical point of view with his background in film and literature which is why he thought that KENK was the perfect event.
“I’m interested in concept and it’s such a great story,” Robinson said.
The presentation was followed by a book signing and the screening of the 1948 Italian film The Bicycle Thief, which tells the story of a poor Italian man who requires a bike in order to keep his job during a depression but it is stolen while he is on the job.