Erentia Bedecker

Erentia Bedeker is a South African-based animator, director, and writer, and co-founder of the independent studio Wreckless Creative. Working primarily in stop-motion, her practice moves between paper cut-outs, object animation, and hand-carved wooden puppets, embracing the tactile and time-intensive nature of the medium. Her films have screened widely at international festivals and received multiple awards. Her debut professional short, The Wild Goose Let a Feather Fall (2016), marked the beginning of an ongoing exploration of poetry through animation. Her film Ruby & Roach (2020), selected for 77 festivals and recipient of 18 awards, further established her voice—intimate, textural, and attentive to the fragile interior lives of her characters. Bedeker has collaborated internationally as animator and concept artist on Today as I Run (2021), directed by Julia Hu?man for Sierra Club Colorado, and as director/animator on Wildlife Cameraman (Summer Farm) (2023) for the Scottish band Constant Follower, which screened at 35 festivals and received 6 awards. Her latest film, The Stonemason (2026) marks her first project as writer-producer—a meditation on authorship, material resistance, and the act of making. In 2025, she was selected for the Triggerfish & UNESCO Creators Lab for Women Directors in Africa. She holds a BA in Acting and an Honours degree in Afrikaans and Dutch from Stellenbosch University, as well as a postgraduate qualification in Education. She is also a published poet, freelance puppeteer, and performer, and is currently furthering her studies online at the Academy of the Wooden Puppet in Iceland. Bedeker’s practice is rooted in the handmade as both aesthetic and philosophy—an engagement with slowness, imperfection, and care. Her films seek not to resolve, but to soften: to carve out spaces where vulnerability, memory, and meaning can quietly surface. ARTISTIC STATEMENT Through handcrafted animation, Erentia Bedeker explores the emotional textures of human experience. Her work embraces slowness, tactility, and imperfection as a counterpoint to digital uniformity, aiming to create films that soften the world’s sharp edges and resonate on a deeply human level.