Hospital, with Love
2026 · 3m
Directed by Carine Khalifé
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
The daughter of a surgeon reflects on the place of humanity in hospitals increasingly transformed by technology. Painted in paint-on-glass and charcoal, this animated documentary moves from childhood wonder at hospital life to an adult search for what the machines have replaced.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent meditative stuff, but the paint-on-glass technique and the daughter-reflects-on-dad's-work setup feel like they're apologizing for being too earnest—which is exactly when contrarian cinema should double down instead of reaching for texture.
Khalifé situses this personal essay firmly in the lineage of Chbosky and the hand-drawn documentary tradition, and the formal discipline of paint-on-glass animation—that constraint itself—becomes the argument about what technology erases: the visible human hand.
The pivot from childhood wonder to adult disenchantment could be sentimental, but the decision to let charcoal and paint physically dissolve on glass as the machines take over—that's the one choice that makes the abstraction concrete.
Reviews
As a surgeon's daughter, she once roamed the hospital with wonder. As an adult, she searches for the humanity that has been replaced by machines.