Lindsey Marie Martin

Pottero (2021)

This contemporary Appalachian folktale recounts a woman’s attempt to escape her childhood monster, the Pottero. The journey forces her to reconcile with the place she came from and the monsters waiting for her there. Pottero has screened at over 35 national and international film festivals and has received a number of awards including Best Animation, Best Short Film and Best Screenplay.

Project Statement:

The piece was developed in response to the loss of a close family member who was dealing with issues around access to healthcare, the cyclical nature of poverty and generational mental illness. It’s a personal narrative examining my own “escape” via social mobility as I understand the privilege education and access have awarded me in adulthood. It’s also about that struggle to connect to a community I tried so hard to leave.

Pottero uses a reflexive framework. It’s a folktale within a folktale featuring my family monster, a violent beast who suffers from a pretty serious case of constipation due to a disturbing anatomical abnormality. The story is part preacher tale, part standup comedy, with an objective to instill a mishmash of puritanical ideas into children. For some, those monsters stay with us as we grow into adults- waiting to feed on financial insecurities, depression, addiction and repression. 

Using the medium of animation, I’m bringing up some shared historical traumas of the Appalachian region to make new narratives around transformation. The worlds created by animation defy all rules- gravity/physics/reality, allowing my monster to come to life, shifting and changing much like the people here and everywhere.

This story has inspired others to tell their own monster tales through a series of community animation workshops being developed in partnership with the Ohio Valley Center for Collaborative Arts. For the last 18 months, we’ve given women in recovery the tools and agency to to tell their own monster stories. This work is imperative to changing representation of Appalachia and to raise questions about our identities, the relationships to the locations we come from, and all those monsters waiting for us there.

Credits: Lindsey Martin- Writer, Animator; Thomasin Parnes- Illustrator; Kass Richards- Score; Alexis McCrimmon- Sound Design and Mix