It Wasn't Bourgogne
2020 · 7m · France
Directed by Mathias de Panafieu
Genres: animation, documentary, war
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, melancholic
Between two unsolicited phone calls, the director's grandfather recalls his Second World War memories as a twenty-year-old soldier.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a war documentary wrapped in animation, which should be contrarian gold, but the execution is too reverent—de Panafieu treats his grandfather's testimony with such formal care that the subversive potential gets buried under melancholy sincerity.
The formal rigor here is exquisite: animated segments framing oral testimony, the phone calls as structural anchors, the tonal calibration between darkly comic moments and genuine trauma—this is a film that knows exactly where it sits in the lineage of memory and documentary form.
The choice to animate rather than show archival footage or photographs is clever, but what really lands is how de Panafieu lets silence and the grandfather's voice breathing do the work—no manipulative score, just presence and the specific texture of a man's memory.
Reviews
Rendered in black-and-white, pencil-textured animation, the short features d'Ivernois recalling his time liberating villages in France, including an episode, alluded to in the title, in which he stole wine from a house's basement while marching towards a battle in which he thought he was likely to die. De Panafieu cleverly bookends the piece with his grandfather answering two unsolicited phone calls, emphasising the immense challenge of conveying experiences of war during times of peace.