Close the Shutters
2016 · 5m · Israel
Directed by Ynon Lan
Genres: animation, documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young man tries to hold on to the image of his sick grandfather by piecing together fragments of memory, in a mix of still photography, rotoscope animation, and stop motion.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Okay, so rotoscope + stop motion + still photography in a five-minute elegy for a grandfather—that's either pretentious mush or genuinely weird, and honestly I'm not convinced Lan commits hard enough to either extreme to make it sing.
Lan's collage of media is a sophisticated formal strategy rooted in the essay film tradition, where fragmentation mirrors the unreliability of memory itself; the restraint in execution—the refusal to sentimentalize—places this squarely in a lineage of rigorous memorial cinema.
The decision to let still photographs breathe unchanged while animation moves around them creates this uncanny temporal friction that makes you *feel* the difference between what's fixed and what's slipping away—a small formal choice that does all the emotional work.
Reviews
I wanted to explore the question of how we remember loved ones after they pass away, and in the film I suggest that we remember them through fragmented memories. A collage of small moments and intimate gestures that form the image of a person.
An experimental mix of still photography, stop motion and rotoscope animation by director and animator Ynon Lan. Created as his thesis project at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, "Close the Shutters" is an exploration of the way we remember our loved ones and is based on the personal experiences of Lan and his family.