Baba
2014 · 3m · New Zealand
Directed by Joel Kefali
Genres: animation, biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An elderly Turkish migrant in New Zealand recounts his early refugee days in Auckland to his grandson, who animates the memories.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a competent intergenerational memory piece, sure, but it plays it devastatingly straight—grandson animates grandpa's nostalgia, everyone learns something, roll credits. Where's the formal rupture that makes you question what remembering even *is*?
A formally elegant fusion of oral history and rotoscoped animation that inherits from both the documentary-essay tradition and experimental animation lineage; the restraint in not over-stylizing the memory work shows real curatorial intelligence.
The decision to have the grandson *animate* rather than narrate or illustrate the grandfather's voice—that one structural choice collapses distance between generations and makes the act of remembering visibly shared; it's how Kefali does intimate with almost no budget.