27
2023 · 11m · France, Hungary
Directed by Flora Anna Buda
Alice, approaching her 27th birthday, still lives with her parents and endures a suffocating domestic routine — retreating into fantasies fueled by alcohol and substances until even those escape routes close off.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The Palme d'Or is merely confirmation of what the film's own pigment announces: 27 is one of the definitive animated shorts of its generation.
Watercolor textures, drunken bike crash, arrested development at twenty-seven — animated festival catnip, and Flora Anna Buda knows exactly which buttons to press. The execution is hallucinatory enough to justify the cliché.
Watercolor textures burning oranges and reds against a black void to externalize a 27-year-old still-at-home woman's drunken bike accident and reckoning — Buda's hallucinatory color logic is doing the emotional work without translation. The premise sounds slim; the technique suggests otherwise.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 2023, Palme d'Or for Best Short Film
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2023, Cristal for Best Animated Narrative Short