Black Soul
2000 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Martine Chartrand
Genres: animation, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
A young boy follows his grandmother's stories through the events that shaped Black cultural heritage, travelling through history to trace his roots.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A grandmother-to-grandson oral history wrapped in animation sounds like the most consensus-friendly thing ever, except Chartrand refuses to make it safe—the mythic tone does real work here, bending family narrative into something stranger and less reassuring than we expect.
Chartrand situates this film in a direct lineage with griots and animated essay-cinema, using the grandmother's voice and the journey through historical moments as a formal argument about how memory and cultural inheritance actually transmit—the craft is in what she *doesn't* illustrate.
The singular choice here is treating the grandmother's storytelling as the camera itself—her voice doesn't narrate the history, it *becomes* the visual logic—and that one decision transforms what could be didactic into something intimate and searching.