"Helen Hill was an artist, filmmaker, community activist and subversive southern belle…Her life was an inspired art project." The Guardian

1981
At the age of eleven Helen Hill creates her first short animated film. The stop-motion Super 8 film she entitled The House of Sweet Magic. 

September 1988
Helen and Paul meet during their first week at Harvard. She is a free-spirited young woman from South Carolina and Paul a physician’s son from Edmonton on his way to fulfilling his dreams of one day serving as a doctor in Africa.

1990
Helen’s 16mm animated short Rain Dance is made while at Haravard. The film is dedicated to film/TV writer Elijah Aron who was working on a novel about rain at the time. The film was restored in 2007. 

1992
Helen Hill earns her B.S. at Harvard University. While majoring in English, she also minors in Visual and Environmental Studies.

Vessel, also made at Harvard is inspired by a poem written by Hill and first published in 1991 in Canadian magazine The Rag.

Shortly after graduation close friends Paul and Helen make their way to New Orleans for the summer, drawn to the Big Easy’s vibrant arts and music scene with progressive social sensibility. That summer they fall in love. Hill’s film Tunnel of Love  { Watch the film}  tells the story of their "accidental romance," accompanied by a song written and performed by Paul.

1993
Helen and Paul head off to opposite ends of the continent: she to Los Angeles for graduate work in film, he to Nova Scotia for medical school.

Paul forms a band called Piggy during his years at Dalhousie med school. He would later form a band called the Troublemakers whose lyrics traced such issues as universal health care, flag burning and rising up to resistance. Music was a large part of who Paul was. His views often shared through this medium.

1995
Helen Hill applies for an Interschool Grant to bring artists together. With the grant money she purchases a cotton candy machine — something she had always longed for. It becomes the focus of her film The World’s Smallest Fair made at CalArts. The story revolves around artists (her fellow CalArts students) using cotton candy as their medium. Gailiunas and Aron also make appearances.

Helen Hill’s MFA thesis film Scratch and Crow is produced. The film is inspired by her years on her cousin’s farm growing up.

June 18, 1995
Helen and Paul marry in Columbia, South Carolina at the chapel of the University of South Carolina.  Kevin Lewis, Helen’s stepfather officiates the wedding.

After graduating from CalArts with an MFA, Helen moves to Halifax to be with Paul.  She becomes a Canadian Citizen and continues to create films and teach film animation at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (now NSCAD University) and at the Atlantic Filmakers Cooperative. Helen and Paul live in the Halifax's culturally- and economically-diverse north end. Helen would later make a film about their Halifax community in her 2004 film called Bohemian Town.

1999
Hill’s film Mouseholes remembers her beloved grandfather, Pop.

December 17, 2000
Helen, Paul, their pet pot-bellied pig Rosie and cat, Nola, return to New Orleans to settle in the Mid-City district. Helen becomes a founding member and animation instructor of the New Orleans Filmakers Cooperative. She also works as a storyboard artist for the National Film Board of Canada during this time.

2001
Madame Winger Makes A Film: A Survival Guide for the 21st Century  { Watch the film}  is part of a group of films the Canada Council for the Arts funded on the theme of filmmaking and the new millennium. Madame Winger expresses Hill’s belief that the idea behind a film is more important than the technology used. The voice of Madame Winger is that of Hill’s godmother, Meredith Pogue.

2002
Helen Hill receives the Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship Grant, to complete an animated film about the handmade dresses of a blind 90-year-old African American seamstress named Florestine Kinchen.

Here is the story behind what inspired Helen's film: Helen came across a trash pile of dresses on the side of the road on her way to Mardi Gras. She held up the dresses and they were her size. Helen was not the type to let her curiosity fade so she searched for the identity of the woman with whom she felt a spiritual kinship. The pile of dresses belonged to Florestine Kinchen, a blind 90-year-old African American seamstress whose family had emptied her house just after her death. For Helen, Kinchen’s life was perfect material for a film. She soon came to know the pastor of the neighborhood Baptist church where Florestine Kinchen attended. He shared stories of Florestine and her many hand sewn dresses. In 2004, Helen received a highly coveted Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, worth $35,000 towards her film titled The Florestine Collection, the story of the African American seamstress and the racial divide in New Orleans.

April 2004
Paul and his colleague Taura Parquet open The Little Doctor’s Neighbourhood Clinic offering healthcare to those with little or no income.

October 15, 2004
Helen Hill gives birth to their son Francis Pop.

Helen continues to teach animation through the New Orleans Video Access Centre (NOVAC) and through the New Orleans Film Collective, which she co-founded with other members of the local film community.