A Love Letter to the One I Made Up
2018 · 6m · Israel
Directed by Rachel Gutgarts
Genres: animation, experimental, romance
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A painstakingly animated silkscreened short built around love letters written by real women to an imaginary perfect partner.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a love letter to a ghost, which is genuinely unsettling in a way that most romance shorts aren't brave enough to touch—but the silkscreen restraint keeps it from becoming the messy, confrontational thing it could be, which feels like a missed opportunity.
Gutgarts locates herself squarely in the lineage of feminist animation and epistolary form, and the painstaking silkscreen technique is the formal decision that makes the premise's melancholy felt rather than merely stated—each frame costs something, and you see it.
The choice to let real women's words carry the visual weight, rather than narrate over it, means the animation has to *listen*—and that restraint, that refusal to oversell the emotion, is what makes six minutes of silkscreened longing land like a gut punch.
Reviews
This short film explores the recesses of our need for connection and our most seductive relationship fantasies. Poignant and frustrating, this abstract and painstakingly animated silkscreened piece manages to be immediate, meditative, and fleeting all at once.