Birth
2009 · 10m · USA, Italy
Directed by Signe Baumane
Genres: animation, comedy, drama
Tones: darkly comic, melancholic, surreal
Amina is 17 and pregnant. Afraid to give birth, she seeks consolation and advice from older women, but their harrowing stories of childbirth only scare her even more.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Signe Baumane hand-drawn surreal-comic childbirth horror stories told to a terrified pregnant teenager. The anxiety-as-absurdism angle is exactly her thing and it works.
Baumane's hand-drawn surrealist treatment of pregnancy anxiety carries forward the tradition of Borowczyk and the Quay Brothers in deliberate emotional grotesquerie — her later Rocks in My Pockets confirmed the auteur trajectory. A useful early work.
Signe Baumane crediting herself as director / writer / animator / designer over 11:43 with composer Kamala Sankaram on voice — that's the singular-voice hand-drawn animation lineage that Baumane built her career on (Rocks in My Pockets followed). Childbirth horror as absurdist comedy with one artist's full fingerprints.
Reviews
Director Baumane succinctly captures an emotional quest for knowledge through the eyes of a young girl who is pregnant and afraid. A marvelously animated tale of Birth as an event.
Signe Baumane's 'Birth' is a wonderfully dark and honest animated short that presents in a fun way a great dilemma such as teenage pregnancy.
Festivals
- Berlin International Film Festival 2009
- South by Southwest Film Festival 2009
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2009
- Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film 2009
- Florida Film Festival 2009