In Other Words
2015 · 6m · Israel
Directed by Tal Kantor
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A man remembers a missed chance to communicate with his daughter, and their brief meeting years later shatters his world and empties his words of meaning.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to expect this to wallow in regret, but Kantor's actually doing something weirder—using animation to fracture language itself, making the father's aphasia feel like a formal problem rather than just a sad one. It's restrained enough that most people will miss the subversion.
The precision of the animation and editing here sits in direct conversation with the literary tradition of absence and linguistic failure; Kantor treats the gap between what's meant and what's said as a compositional challenge, not just emotional content. This is the kind of formally considered work that gets taught.
The decision to animate rather than shoot live is the whole film—it lets Kantor compress the father's internal collapse into pure visual abstraction without ever winking at the audience. That restraint, that choice to trust the medium's coldness to carry the tenderness, is what makes six minutes feel complete.
Reviews
Repéré aux festivals de Tel Aviv et d'Annecy il y a deux ans, In Other Words est un film d'animation de près de 6 minutes réalisé par une ancienne étudiante de l'Académie Bezalel de Jérusalem, Tal Kantor. Jusqu'ici, son film précédent, In Other Words, ne se laissait approcher que par teaser, carrièr