By Winds and Tides
2022 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Bogdan Anifrani-Fedach
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Images and words drift through an allegory about how an idea forms and releases. Conscious and unconscious currents shape the experimental flow.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of animated allegory about idea-formation sounds like the exact kind of precious experimentalism that gets mistaken for depth—but Anifrani-Fedach's refusal to literalize the metaphor, letting image and word stay genuinely estranged, actually lands the subversion most filmmakers are too earnest to attempt.
A formally rigorous essay film that understands its lineage in structural animation and lyric cinema, where each drift of image against voiceover becomes a deliberate argument about consciousness itself; the restraint here—the decision to let ambiguity breathe rather than resolve—places it squarely in a tradition of thoughtful, uncompromising shorts.
The singular choice is the desynchronization: by letting the animation and narration orbit each other without collision, Anifrani-Fedach creates meaning in the gap itself, turning a constraint of the form into the film's actual subject with an economy that justifies every second of runtime.