Mascaras/Masques/Masks
1997 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Elisa Rivas
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
From infancy, a boy repeatedly rejects the masks society offers him — at home, school, and work — until he meets a woman facing the same struggle and their child repeats the pattern.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A generational-cycle parable about rejecting social masks sounds like every indie coming-of-age film ever made, but Rivas animates it with enough formal strangeness that the predictable premise actually becomes unsettling—which is the only way this story deserves to be told.
Rivas positions this film squarely in the tradition of European philosophical animation—Švankmajer's unease, Murakami's cyclical dread—while maintaining a distinct visual grammar that tracks how constraint and autonomy negotiate across three lifespans with meticulous compositional discipline.
The coup here is probably the editing rhythm that lets the masks themselves become the only character for entire passages, transforming what could've been a clunky metaphor into something tactile and disorienting through pure tempo and negative space.