Focus
2014 · 1m · Canada
Directed by Alex Boya
Genres: animation, experimental
A one-minute cart ride speeds through the mental shopping mall of attention deficit disorder. The Hothouse short renders distraction as a frantic browse past endless stimuli.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A one-minute visual cacophony that treats ADHD not as a diagnosis to sympathize with but as a legitimate mode of consciousness—a shopping mall sprint that refuses the tired documentary-realism approach everyone else would've sleepwalked into. Most scouts would've called it 'relatable'; Felix calls it subversive.
Boya positions this squarely in the lineage of experimental animation's tradition of visualizing internal states, echoing the formal playfulness of earlier clinic-turned-gallery works, though the frantic pacing and absurdist logic lean more toward contemporary digital satire than the measured abstraction the form typically demands.
The magic lives in the editing rhythm—each cut doesn't just show distraction, it *enacts* it, making the montage itself the formal decision that transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely felt. Watch how the cart's momentum becomes the viewer's own cognitive overload.