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Kate Bush's directorial film debut, the anti-war animation Little Shrew, is now a prize-winner. The four-minute film, which was released in late 2024, picked up the Animation prize at this year's Carmarthen Bay Film Festival in Wales.
“How wonderful! Little Shrew is incredibly excited that she’s been awarded such a huge honour,” said Bush. “Thank you so very much from her, myself and all the team. We are over the moon!”
"What an incredible year it has been for the Carmarthen Bay Film Festival," says festival curator Stifyn Parri. "This year’s success has been beyond anything I could have imagined – most notably because a lifelong inspiration of mine, Kate Bush, shared her remarkable work with us by entering her film."
Little Shrew, which is soundtracked by an edit of Bush's 2011 track Snowflake, depicts a shrew making her way across a bombed-out city and was inspired by Ukraine's military conflict with Russia.
"It's been such a long period of peace we'd all been living through," Bush told the BBC when the film was released. "And I just felt I wanted to make a little animation that would feature, originally, a little girl. It was really the idea of children caught up in war. I wanted to draw attention to how horrific it is for children.
"And so I came up with this idea for a storyboard and felt that, actually, people would be more empathetic towards a creature rather than a human. So I came up with the idea of it being a little shrew."
Little Shrew was written and directed by Bush, while Nicolette Van Gendt provided the animation. The film has now been screened at several BAFTA-qualifying events, making it eligible for entry into the BAFTA awards (the UK equivalent of the Oscars).
