Ex-Filante
2023 · 6m · France
Directed by Hugo Mermillod
Genres: animation, fantasy, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, mythic
Fallen stars meet to discuss their shared trauma, and Rose steals shards from other stars to rebuild her own celestial body and return to the sky.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Rose cannibalizing other fallen stars to rebuild herself is *deliciously* bleak—most scouts will read this as gentle melancholy, but Mermillod's actually made a film about predatory recovery, and nobody's talking about it.
Mermillod situates this squarely in the lineage of mythic animation—Halas & Batchelor's existential fables, maybe early Michaël Dudok de Wit—where the formal restraint of the animation *is* the emotional argument, and the premise serves the craft, not vice versa.
The specific choice here is the editing rhythm between the stars' confessions and Rose's silent theft—that sync between dialogue and action, never hammering the metaphor, is what makes the whole thing work on a 6-minute, probably modest budget.
Festivals
- ITFS Stuttgart 2024