Letter to a Pig
2022 · 17m · Israel, France
Directed by Tal Kantor
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
On Holocaust Memorial Day, an elderly survivor reads a letter of gratitude to the pig who saved his life to a classroom of teenagers. A sensitive student, Alma, spirals into a surreal dream confronting inherited trauma, collective memory, and identity.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Holocaust testimony filtered through a teenage girl's surreal dream rather than the survivor's perspective — that's an actual structural reframing, not just decoration. Oscar-nominated, deserves the press.
Kantor layering hand-drawn animation, photography, and live action to route Holocaust testimony through a teenage girl's dreamscape — Annecy and Oscar-nominated, in the Waltz with Bashir tradition of letting form carry trauma. The displacement of perspective from survivor to listener is the precise structural insight.
Hand-drawn animation, photography, painting, and live-action layered to displace Holocaust testimony into a teenage girl's dreamscape — that's the structural move that earns this material in 2022. Oscar-nominated; the medium-stacking is the whole thesis.
Reviews
It is hard to remember a recent film that tackles such a large, abstract, yet important theme as Letter to a Pig does, capturing how memory, reality, and the subconscious intertwine and influence each other. Its honest and raw look at that emotionally charged topic is what makes the film so captivating and powerful.
It is not only a great short, but an important one, too — a film we expect to be referenced and returned to in the coming years.
Festivals
- Academy Awards 2024, Nominee
- Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2022, Winner
- Jerusalem Film Festival 2022, Winner
- Ottawa International Animation Festival 2022, Winner
- Chicago International Children's Film Festival 2022, Winner