Aphasia
2023 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Marielle Dalpé
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An animated sensory immersion into aphasia, the condition that progressively destroys the ability to speak and understand words in many people with Alzheimer's disease.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most aphasia films play it straight—grieving, linear, PSA-adjacent—but Dalpé goes full abstract, which should be obvious and yet somehow no one else thinks to do it; the fact that it *works* as pure sensory dissolution rather than narrative tragedy is genuinely disarming.
This is precisely the kind of formally rigorous abstract animation that sits in conversation with Len Lye and contemporary essay film—Dalpé's decision to render cognitive loss as visual and sonic abstraction rather than representation shows a curator's understanding of what animation uniquely offers, and the 4-minute constraint becomes a formal virtue rather than limitation.
The choice to let sound—particularly the fragmentation and repetition of language itself—do the cognitive work rather than rely on visual metaphor is what makes this land; you could remake this shot-for-shot with different sound design and it collapses, which means everything hinges on that one specific decision about how to listen.
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival 2023, English-language premiere
- Festival du nouveau cinéma 2023, French-language premiere
- Yorkton Film Festival 2024, Animation award; Emerging Filmmaker
- Canadian Screen Awards 2024, Nominated - Best Animated Short