Inside Hothouse 15 - Part 3
2025 · 11m · Canada
Directed by Simon Girard
Genres: animation, documentary
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Six emerging animators in the NFB's 12-week Hothouse 15 residency create their first professional animated shorts with full National Film Board support, captured behind the scenes in part three.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A meta-documentary about animation students making animation? It's the kind of navel-gazing that usually puts me to sleep, except Girard seems genuinely interested in the friction between institutional support and individual vision—there's something subversive lurking in how he frames the 'emergence' of these voices.
Girard positions this within the lineage of artist-process cinema and the NFB's own legacy of nurturing emerging animators, and the formal choice to observe creation rather narrate it honors that tradition while adding contemporary texture to how we understand artistic formation.
The decision to film *other people's* creative breakthroughs rather than the breakthroughs themselves—watching the animators' doubt and iteration instead of their finished frames—is what makes this work; it trusts that the labor itself, not the polished result, is where the singularity lives.