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Abortion Party
“Okay, there we go,” Julia Mellen declares in front of a webcam, her cat in her arms. The Madrid-based Brazilian-American goes all out in her DIY-animated retelling of a garden party full of misfits that she organised at the age of twenty, following a successful (second) abortion. She’s not squeamish about poking fun at herself. Despite—or perhaps because of—her audiovisual bricolage, Mellen manages to embed herself seamlessly into the culture and slang of the digital generation, anno brat era.
Mellen talks at breakneck speed. She recorded her canned voice on an iPhone because her sole pair of batteries needed to be shared between her keyboard and vibrator. The frame of her webcam nervously floats in all directions, and her animated 3D characters are often constructed from triangles, squares, and trapezoids. The result resembles a PowerPoint presentation, complete with crazy text animations. The chaotic Abortion Party is wildly funny but also painfully relevant, as Mellen herself concludes. “I didn’t think I was going to make this film anymore, but unfortunately it’s become topical again (...) Y’all love that.”