Gathering Storm
2003 · 6m · Canada
Directed by David Rimmer
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Hand-painted, camera-less imagery builds a gathering storm against contemporary world-music rhythms. David Rimmer fuses uplift with political disorder in a wordless abstract film.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Rimmer's doing the most boring thing possible—hand-painted abstraction synced to world music—and somehow landing nowhere near the po-faced meditation everyone expects; there's something genuinely unsettling about how uplift and political dread refuse to resolve into either.
A rigorously composed work that inherits from the structural film tradition while dialoguing with 1970s expanded cinema, where each painterly gesture becomes a considered statement about representation and form in the face of chaos.
The decision to let the rhythm lead rather than the image—to subordinate the hand-painted marks to a pulse that doesn't match them—creates an almost physical discomfort that a bigger budget would've smoothed away entirely.