Drop by Drop (Água Mole)
2017 · 9m · Portugal
Directed by Alexandra Ramires, Laura Gonçalves
Genres: animation, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
The last inhabitants of a dying village in Portugal refuse to be forgotten, their personal stories woven into a single community narrative against the relentless march of 'progress.' A hybrid documentary and animation that treats an eroding rural world with both grief and defiance.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A dying village talks back through hand-drawn animation — treating documentary ethnography as a haunting formal puzzle is precisely the kind of 'wait, WHAT?' premise I live for.
Quinzaine selection in the Portuguese animated-doc tradition of BAP Studio — real testimony animated in folk-art textures makes ethnography porous to fiction without dishonoring either register.
Hand-drawn animation over real testimonies from a dying Portuguese village's last residents — folk-art textures collapsing ethnography and fiction. Quinzaine Cannes 2017, Staff Pick Premiere; the elegiac form earns its weight.
Reviews
It is the treatment of texture and rhythm that makes this object so unique.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival — Directors' Fortnight 2017
- Toronto International Film Festival 2017
- Chicago International Film Festival 2017, Gold Plaque (Second Place)
- Animanima International Animation Festival 2017, Special Jury Award