In the Shallows
2024 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Arash Akhgari
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
Handmade collages and ink-and-paint animation immerse viewers in the fragmented flood of news, entertainment and advertising, where constant media streams threaten to drown perception of reality.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a visual migraine disguised as social commentary—which would be boring if the collage assault didn't actually *feel* like drowning in your phone. The surrealism lands because it refuses to be earnest about it.
Akhgari stakes his work in a lineage of structural cinema and visual essay-making (Brakhage, Marker), where handmade materials become a rigorous counterargument to digital noise; the fragmentation is formal rigor, not accident.
The choice to build the piece from *handmade* collage and ink rather than digital glitch effects is the entire film—it's a tactile, human resistance that cuts through the premise's abstraction and makes the media flood feel genuinely suffocating instead of just clever.