Goutte d'Eau
2023 · 4m · France
Directed by Selma el Malki
Genres: animation, comedy, drama
Tones: absurdist, tender, whimsical
A grandmother who cannot mourn her husband's death confides in her family, who give her strange advice to help her cry.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A grief comedy where the family's 'advice' gets genuinely unhinged—it's a premise that could collapse into sentimentality, but el Malki treats the absurdity as the honest thing, which is exactly the kind of tonal risk most scouts would hedge away from.
The film understands something about animation as a mode for emotional distance, using whimsy as a formal language rather than a tonal escape—there's rigor in how it holds grief and comedy in the same frame without letting either one win.
The specific choice here is that el Malki lets the grandmother's inability to cry be treated as a real problem the family scrambles to solve, and that pragmatic, almost bureaucratic approach to mourning—the way each family member offers their strange remedy—is what makes the tenderness land instead of feeling obligatory.
Festivals
- ITFS Stuttgart 2024