Balcony
2016 · 6m · Hungary
Directed by David Dell'Edera
Genres: animation, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, surreal
On a hazy summer afternoon in a quiet block of flats, a stranger arrives and begins screaming for no reason — and the contagious outburst spreads until the whole neighborhood joins in.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A graduation film that actually *earns* its absurdism—the premise (contagious screaming as social collapse) refuses to wink at you or resolve into comfort, and the hybrid animation technique feels like a genuine formal choice rather than aesthetic decoration, which is rarer than it should be.
Dell'Edera's layering of hand-drawn figures against 3D environments situates itself deliberately within a lineage of Eastern European animation and Brechtian satire, the technique serving the alienation effect rather than novelty—a formally considered meditation on collective behavior that respects its own visual grammar.
The decision to animate the characters in 2D while rendering the architecture in 3D is the entire film: it creates an uncanny distance between the human and the built environment, making the screaming feel both intimate and impossibly isolated, and that one choice does all the thematic work a short this size could ask for.
Reviews
Balcony doesn't have the type of storyline you'd be dying to talk about after watching, but there's something raw and visceral about experiencing it.
Dell'Edera captures the haze of summertime so perfectly you can almost feel the warmth of it, but it's the contagious feeling of the screaming that has the oddest effect.
Festivals
- Annecy International Animated Film Festival 2016, Jury Award
- Tribeca Film Festival 2016
- Premiers Plans Angers Film Festival 2017, Grand Prix du Jury