Here and the Great Elsewhere
2012 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Michèle Lemieux
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Using pinscreen animation, a lone figure moves through four tableaux pondering the particles of the universe and humanity's search for meaning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Pinscreen animation is inherently weird—a medium nobody uses anymore—but Lemieux doesn't lean into the gimmick; she lets the form serve something genuinely philosophical instead of contrarian for its own sake, which is annoyingly restrained of her.
Lemieux's pinscreen work sits squarely in the lineage of Alexeieff and Parker, yet Here and the Great Elsewhere stakes its own claim through rigorous formal restraint—four discrete tableaux, each a meditation on scale and absence that recalls both structural film and the essay tradition.
The singular choice here is the decision to let the pinscreen's tactile, shadow-rendered figures move almost glacially through cosmic abstraction—that friction between handmade texture and existential vastness is what makes this work on a shoestring rather than feeling like a technical demo.