And Granny Would Dance
2024 · 10m · United Kingdom
Directed by Maryam Mohajer
Genres: animation, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Little Marmar listens to her grandmother's friends play an illicit game of cards, and their stories bloom into a 2D-animated tale of love, grief, and women's resilience in Iran.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Here's a film that could've been a safe, sentimental family piece—instead, Mohajer smuggles in something genuinely subversive: the world-building happens in the margins, in the spaces between what we see and what we hear, and it trusts the audience to assemble the real story themselves.
The formal elegance here is unmistakable—a nested-narrative structure that echoes literary modernism, where 2D animation becomes the visual language of memory itself, situated squarely in a lineage of experimental documentary-animation hybrids that interrogate intimacy and cultural specificity.
The decision to let the grandmother's card game remain largely unseen, relegated to ambient sound while animation blooms around it, is the hinge the whole film turns on—a single structural choice that transforms what could be illustrative into something genuinely intimate and earned.