Le Gouffre
2015 · 11m · Canadá
Directed by Carl Beauchemin, David Forest, Thomas Chrétien
Genres: adventure, animation, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Two travelling companions encounter an incredibly large abyss on their journey and decide to build a bridge to cross it, in Lightning Boy Studio's animated short.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Bridge-building as metaphor feels safe to me—sincere and mythic in exactly the way festivals eat up. Still, there's something genuinely strange about the scale of the abyss itself; the film leans into the absurdity of the task without winking, and I respect that.
A formally composed meditation on collaborative creation and traversal, situated squarely in the lineage of contemplative animation from Eastern European traditions. The restraint in the visual language and the deliberate pacing mark this as work aware of its own aesthetic inheritance.
The decision to show the bridge's construction in real time—the actual labor, the materials, the two bodies moving through space together—transforms what could be abstract symbolism into something tactile and earned; that specificity of process is what sells the whole thing.