Binocular Briefs – December 2023

In this month's Binocular Briefs, we take a gander at a series of meditative works that stimulate some tough questions about life… and we end with a brief and beautiful comic work that sums it all up.

See you in 2024.

Zima, Tomek Popakul & Kasumi Ozeki, Poland

For me, Zima was the highlight of the 2023 animation circuit.

This film is about us: our beauty, pain, alienation, and cruelty. All of it. It’s us now, then, and tomorrow.

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When I first saw Zima (as an OIAF submission), I wasn’t sure how I felt. There was something, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. In the end, after at least one more screening, I rolled the dice and selected Zima.

Now, this is where we have that festival problem. Most festival audiences, including juries, encounter a film once. That can create a problem for multi-layered work like Zima. You need a patient audience and a few viewings to really unlock its treasures. Of course, we are not patient at all. This is why - and I mean no disrespect because I do like the work a lot - films like 27 run home with more awards. It’s colourful, relatable, and it’s got sexy time. But really, 27 is not a film that requires many viewings to unlock all the mysteries. And that’s perfectly okay. It’s just a reminder that we should not put a lot of stock in award winners of any kind because most of these decisions are being made in less-than-ideal contexts.

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With that morning musing out of the way, let’s dive quickly (even this column cannot do justice to most films) into Zima (Polish for ‘winter’). Set on an island in winter, we encounter an array of islanders, including Anka, a Jesus-loving woman who wants to save and be saved. Islanders and animals perform dances of cruelty and kindness as they teeter between loneliness and community.

Zima unfolds like a magic realist novella, casually melding mundane realism with the unbelievable (e.g., the woman making out with Jesus in the forest) as it somehow lovingly captures the inconsistencies, the shitholery, the utter fucking meanness, and the beauty of being.

This is maybe a film you don’t want to see but need to.

Greylands, Charlotte Waltert & Alvaro Schoeck, Switzerland

Sometimes, the best works of art are kind of about nothing… well… okay... not nothing cause there has to be something… but let’s say the seemingly mundane, the everyday.

One of my favorite animation shorts is Skip Battaglia’s Crossing the Stream. It’s about a guy walking his horse across a body of water. That’s it, yet that’s all. There’s a similar vibe to Greylands, only this is set in mountainous landscapes in late fall/early winter as a father and son walk. Beautifully conceived, paced, drawn, and animated, Greylands is a meditative work about mortality that draws you in without you even realizing it.

Like Zima, we’re never totally sure if what we’re seeing is being dreamed, imagined, or experienced. Yet it’s okay. We don’t care (well, I don’t). We are content to let go and bathe in the fragmented sights and sounds.

Hardly Working, Total Refusal, Austria

It seems I’m on a meditative kick. Here’s a provocative work that I was not sure about when helping with selection for the Animateka festival. I enjoyed this long essay on capitalism and exploitation but wasn’t sure it would work as a festival film. When the Animateka audience awarded Hardly Working the public prize, I was happily proven wrong.

Okay… So, like their other work (including the brilliant How to Disappear), the self-described “pseudo Marxist media guerilla” group returns with another dissection of video game environments for the sheer purpose of revealing some painful political and social truths hidden within.

Essentially, it's a collage. The collective takes existing video games and tinkers with them for their own anti-capitalist purposes. In Hardly Working, the focus is on an assortment of background characters and extras, accompanied by a voiceover that comments on the harsh and pointless reality of their existence. A brilliant, funny, painfully accurate, and ground-breaking critique of human exploitation and the ugliness of capitalism that also tips the hat to those many invisibles who thanklessly toil away for the benefit of everyone but themselves.

Families' Albums, Moïa Jobin-Paré, Canada

In this award-winning work about family photos being breathed forward, Jobin-Paré gets us thinking about not just family and roots, but also the power and relevancy of family photo albums.

While working on a book about the collage films of Lewis Klahr, I got to thinking a lot about this intersection where memory and mass media imagery collide. We live in a society so saturated with background noise and constant sensory attacks that it’s often difficult to find your center, to find YOU. How much has the photographic or video image fucked with our memory banks to the point where we think we experienced something that we didn't? I think it was Paul Auster who said that memory is a story told a second time. In short, even memory is unreliable. I had a period where I discovered some family home movies. I am an ‘actor’ in some of those films. I see myself experiencing something that I have no memory of at all. But going forward, those scenes will leak into my brain and, over time, create a memory that didn’t really exist (oh, and to complicate it all, the experience actually did exist!). Maybe it’s best that we just have an experience, savor it, be there with it, and then move on. Why do we have to keep bringing them forward, especially since they’re so unreliable? Do we learn anything from it, or is it just a sentimental museum exhibition?

Living the Dream, Ben Meinhardt, Canada

Yep.

Enjoy.

A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.