A short animated film Wait by London-based filmmaker Jenny Wright was made on the Studio Support Programme at TAIS in Toronto.

The film uses Galway Kinnell's poem 'Wait' as a starting point and as the structure of the film while Kinnell himself is the film's narrator of his own work. Kinnell wrote 'Wait' in a day for a student who was considering ending their life after a breakup. Wright's animating phase and process in Toronto was 1 film - 1 month - 1 bottle of ink. The film consists of circa 1140 drawings.

It was Kinnell's wife (he died in 2014) who gave Wright permission to use the poem to make her film. She recommended cutting the final line ('Most of all to hear/ the flute of your whole existence/ rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion') as Kinnell himself had done, 30 years after its original publication. It makes for a more hopeful ending.

Wright says: '‘Let us…transfer our love for those whom we have lost to those who yet live’ says Frankenstein. Whether the loss of a relationship, which Kinnell’s poem was in response to, or a person, Wait points to the beauty in life that will return in time and the love, despite great pain, we still have to give.

Combing is the second layer to the film which moves amongst the driving force, the voice of Kinnell reading his own poem. Sometimes, returning to old notebooks, there is an idea already there and in this case it was combing. The process of filmmaking can be, at times, like a kind of untangling of life at that moment. It is soothing, it picks out things of note and gets rid of what is not needed. Combing forms itself visually as a central motif in the film.

The physical process of painting under the rostrum as well as the development of Wait were hugely therapeutic and fun! I will now part with the film and give it to audiences who will hopefully feel something from it, as I have.'

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