Fort York
Saturday, june 14, 2025

The wizard of oz

With the short film Winds of Spring

More than 70 years before Wicked would take Broadway (and later, the world) by storm with its own tale of Elphaba and Glinda in their youth, Victor Fleming’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz set the paradigm for the fantastical coming-of-age movie. After young Dorothy Gale (Queer icon Judy Garland) tries to flee her rural Kansas home to save her dog Toto from the hands of the wicked Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton), she’s knocked out by a tornado and transported to the magical land of Oz – a world populated with good witches, bad witches, inept wizards, talking scarecrows, tin men, flying monkeys, and scared lions (and tigers and bears, oh my!). Oz may be a product of Dorothy’s imagination – all of the characters she runs into do bear an uncanny resemblance to the real people in her life, after all – but for Dorothy, the lessons learned are as real as they can be.

Keyu Chen’s Winds of Spring tells a similar story of a girl who dreams of leaving home for bigger and better things. Gorgeously realized in hand drawn animation inspired by Chinese brushwork and told without a single line of dialogue, Winds of Spring reminds us, like The Wizard of Oz, that it doesn’t matter if our journeys of self discovery are real or imagined, and in the end there truly is no place like home.