Anima
2013 · 18m · Belgique
Directed by Simon Gillard
Genres: documentary, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, mythic, surreal
Through the raw, everyday gestures of two small Burkinabè villages, an invisible soul drifts from body to body and object to object on a silent journey skyward.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Anima does the thing where it pretends to be a documentary but is actually a metaphysical essay masquerading as anthropology—which is exactly the kind of sneaky, genre-collapsing move most scouts would mistake for pretension, and they'd be wrong.
Gillard positions this within a lineage of essayistic cinema that treats the body as text and the village as archive; the formal discipline of observing gesture as spiritual transmission shows a curator's understanding of how constraint becomes transcendence.
The entire film pivots on a single structural choice—the decision to let the camera stay still while the soul moves through the frame—which transforms documentation into something mythic without ever breaking the spell of the everyday.
Reviews
Par un bel étalonnage et un sens aigu du montage, le film parvient à excéder le cadre du portrait. Il propose de suivre le voyage d'une âme (« anima » en latin veut aussi dire « âme ») s'incarnant d'un objet à l'autre.