Don't Let the Sun Catch You Crying
2024 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Natalie Baird, Toby Gillies
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Elder Edith Almadi collaborates with filmmakers Natalie Baird and Toby Gillies in a hand-drawn animated meditation on love and grief. Almadi's drawings and narration honour her son and explore enduring bonds with loved ones who have died.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The hybrid form—hand-drawn animation spliced with documentary testimony—should be clumsy, but instead it refuses to pick a lane and somehow becomes its own thing; Almadi's drawings aren't prettifying grief, they're arguing with it, which is exactly the kind of formal stubbornness that bores people before it matters.
A sophisticated essay film that situates itself squarely in the lineage of animated memoir and experimental nonfiction, where the hand-drawn mark becomes both archive and argument—the co-direction with Baird and Gillies honors Almadi's vision while maintaining the formal rigor that distinguishes documentary collaboration from mere illustration.
The decision to preserve Almadi's own hand-drawn work as the visual throughline—not glossed over or reanimated, but lived-in and imperfect—transforms what could've been a conventional grief narrative into something that trusts the specific texture of an elder's mark-making to carry the weight that narration alone never could.