Hello, Are We in the Show?
2019 · 12m · Belgium
Directed by Simona Denicolai, Ivo Provoost
Genres: animation, comedy, documentary
Tones: contemplative, theatrical, whimsical
Presented like a nature documentary, this animated film observes the animals and visitors of the Sonian Forest near Brussels as if they were performers in a show.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a nature doc that isn't, an animation that pretends it's not animation, a comedy that's also kind of a philosophical statement—but the conceit never collapses into preciousness, which is rarer than it should be.
Denicolai and Provoost are working in a deliberate lineage of essay-films and Godardian genre play, and the precision of their formal strategy—treating documentary convention as a theatrical device—marks them as filmmakers with real curatorial intelligence.
The decision to hold the nature-documentary voice absolutely straight while animating a forest's 'performers' does all the work; it's a single tonal choice that reframes what animals, visitors, and cinema observation actually mean.