I'm OK
2018 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Elizabeth Hobbs
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Wounded on the Russian front in the First World War after a stormy love affair, Expressionist artist Oskar Kokoschka drifts through memories and visions while medics carry him through the forest.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Kokoschka's fever dream wrapped in war trauma could've been a snooze—instead Hobbs lets the Expressionism do the talking, letting paint and nightmare logic eat the plot alive; it's weird without trying to be clever about it.
A formally audacious film that inherits the Expressionist canon without genuflecting to it—the decision to let Kokoschka's own visual language bleed through the narrative structure is the kind of considered formal choice that defines a short's entire lineage.
The choice to collapse documentary biography and psychological abstraction into a single visual register—blurring where Kokoschka's mind ends and the battlefield begins—turns what could be archival performance into something that feels alive and broken in real time.