De riz ou d'Arménie
2011 · 7m · France
Directed by Hélène Marchal, Samy Barras, Romain Blondelle, Céline Seillé
Genres: animation, drama, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Odette's life is rhythmed by tidying up Alphonse's memories, but one day there are none left, and all she can do is invite Alphonse to dance.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Four directors collaborating on a seven-minute meditation on memory loss and intimacy should be a disaster, but instead they've made something that refuses sentiment while being genuinely moving—the surrealist animation serves the emotional gut-punch rather than drowning it.
This sits in precise conversation with the tradition of memory-cinema (Marker, Vigo's *L'Atalante*) while the collective directorship recalls the purposeful collectives of 1970s avant-garde practice; the formal restraint—that choice to end not in loss but in invitation to dance—is masterfully calibrated.
The single decision to animate rather than photograph allows them to compress a lifetime of small gestures into tidying movements that would feel maudlin in live action, and that formal choice—the economy of line over photographic weight—transforms what could be sentimental into something crystalline.