HOUT
2014 · 4m · Netherlands
Directed by Joost Jordens, Bob Los, Mike von Rotz, Wilbert van Veldhuizen, Bram Meulman, Rosalia Black
Genres: animation, biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A retired woodcrafter spends his remaining days in a snow-coated forest, fulfilling his passion: constructing wooden animals.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Six directors making a four-minute meditation on mortality and craft sounds like a committee disaster, but somehow they've resisted the urge to *say* anything—the film just *is*, and that restraint is genuinely perverse.
The collaborative restraint here is remarkable: a formally rigorous study in the documentary-animation hybrid that lets handmade wooden forms and snow-light do the philosophical work, situated squarely in the lineage of Valeska Grisbach and recent Nordic slow cinema.
The decision to animate the carved animals themselves—rather than the craftsman's hands—is what breaks this open; it lets you feel his labor through absence, turning every wooden creature into a small argument against forgetting.