Bavure
2018 · 5m · France
Directed by Donato Sansone
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
From a single brushstroke of red and white tempera, an artist's hand gives life to a body, a skeleton, a man, a woman, a baby and the whole universe in a metaphor of creation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A hand painting Genesis from tempera feels like the exact kind of reverent, expected move everyone would greenlight — which is precisely why it doesn't interest me. Show me the premise that *breaks* something about creation mythology, not the one that aestheticizes it.
Sansone's literalism about the artist's hand as demiurge situates itself cleanly in a lineage from medieval illumination through abstract expressionism, and the restraint of working within tempera's physical constraints—the way color pools and bleeds—becomes a formal argument about creation itself.
The decision to let the brushstroke *remain visible* as it births each figure—not cleaned up, not perfected—is what transforms this from a nice metaphor into something genuinely moving; that imperfection becomes the whole film's thesis about how things come to be.
Reviews
It is from a small brushstroke of paint that BAVURE, the latest short film by Donato Sansone, starts. Everything starts with tempera, a little red and a little white and the hand of a skilled artist, to give life to a body, a skeleton, a man and then a woman, a baby and the whole universe.