Ever Behind The Sunset
2026 · USA
Directed by Jason Mitcham
Genres: animation, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
A hand-painted stop-motion elegy for an artist's childhood home in Greensboro, North Carolina — seized by eminent domain — combining gestural oil-painted frames with archival home videos and a lullaby sung by his late mother.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Mitcham's hand-painted stop-motion is the kind of formally radical, deeply personal work that makes you reconsider what animation can do — grief as brushstroke.
Hand-painted oil-on-canvas stop-motion elegy for a home seized by eminent domain, scored with the director's late mother's lullaby. Every variable here points toward something rare. I'm leaning in.
Hand-painted oil-on-canvas stop-motion as elegy for an eminent-domain seizure — animated grief in literal gestural strokes, accompanied by his late mother's lullaby and family VHS. This is the sort of structural autobiography that earns every painstaking frame; Schwizgebel is the right lineage.