Hammam
2022 · 5m · France
Directed by Zelie Elkihel
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, experimental
Tones: contemplative, sensual, tender
A young woman of mixed French and Moroccan heritage recalls being twelve and entering the traditional Moroccan hammam she had long dreamed of.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a film about cultural heritage to genuflect toward profundity, but Elkihel does something weirder—she animates sensory memory as pure abstraction, letting the hammam dissolve into steam and touch rather than settling for the obvious immigrant-daughter reckoning.
A formally precise meditation on the body and threshold, positioning itself deliberately within the lineage of experimental animation that treats memory as material—the restraint of the color palette and the specificity of the sound design mark this as work conscious of its own tradition.
The entire film turns on a single formal choice: treating the protagonist's skin and the hammam's water not as separate elements but as one continuous, shifting surface, which reframes the whole threshold-crossing narrative through pure tactile cinema rather than exposition.
Festivals
- ITFS Stuttgart 2024
- Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival 2024