Mamie
2016 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Janice Nadeau
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A granddaughter in Gaspésie wonders why her grandmother Mamie keeps her distance and withholds affection, reaching back into childhood memories to understand the break in what was passed between them.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A intergenerational memory film that could've been Hallmark pablum, but Nadeau refuses the easy reconciliation—there's real estrangement here, real withholding, and she lets it sit unresolved in a way that feels almost hostile to comfort.
Nadeau works in the lineage of Michaël Dudok de Wit and National Film Board intimacy, using animation to excavate emotional archaeology with formal precision—the layering of past and present, the restraint of gesture, the refusal to sentimentalize abandonment.
The decision to animate rather than dramatize this grandmother-granddaughter rupture unlocks something live action would've buried: the grandmother's distance becomes a visual syntax of erasure, each frame a carefully withheld gesture that tells you more than dialogue ever could.