Boat People
2023 · 10m
Directed by Thao Lam, Kjell Boersma
Genres: animation, biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
An animated documentary recounting writer/director Thao Lam's own family story: as a little girl in Vietnam, her mother rescued ants from bowls of sugar water, and the tiny creatures later led her desperate family through darkness to safety. Adapted from Lam's book The Paper Boat, narrated by Thao herself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to genuflect at the tenderness here, but what actually arrests me is how Lam weaponizes the ants—a literal insect deus ex machina that somehow avoids sentimentality by leaning into its own mythic absurdity, which most filmmakers would've softened into oblivion.
An exemplary animated documentary that understands its lineage—the lyric essay, the graphic memoir adaptation, the intimate historical record—and executes each thread with formal precision; the restraint in the animation itself becomes the film's moral argument, refusing spectacle in favor of witness.
The decision to have Lam narrate her own story in her own voice, unadorned, becomes the film's load-bearing wall—everything else (the minimal animation, the sugar-water mise-en-scène) follows from that tonal choice, and suddenly a family rescue becomes unbearably specific and singular.
Reviews
Boat People harnesses the talents of animator Kjell Boersma in retaining the hand-crafted look of the original illustrations in service to a compelling narrative that both parallels and contrasts human survival with the instinctual behaviour of ants.