Dimanche
2011 · 10m · Canadá
Directed by Patrick Doyon
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Every Sunday is the same old routine for a Canadian boy: the train shakes the village and the photos on the wall, dad dreams of his toolbox in church, and later grandma visits while the animals meet their fate.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Doyon's doing something sneaky here—wrapping suburban ennui and livestock death in rotoscope whisper, which should be insufferable but somehow isn't, because he refuses to sentimentalize any of it, not even the kid. Most people will find it boring; that's exactly why it works.
A film that understands rotoscope not as stylistic flourish but as the formal language for processing memory itself—the tremble of traced movement mirrors how Sunday routine calcifies into ritual, and Doyon's restraint (no score, no emotional punctuation) places this squarely in the lineage of Švankmajer and early Folman, craft aware of its own tradition.
The decision to animate only the figures, leaving the landscape photographic, creates this haunting spatial vertigo where the boy feels ghostly in his own home—a single formal choice that transforms what could be a CBC coming-of-age sketch into something genuinely uncanny on a student budget.