Maybe It's Me
2017 · 6m · United Kingdom
Directed by Dimitris Simou
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An animator tries to recreate his childhood memories in CGI, using memory's relationship to the digital image to empathize with someone living with dementia.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like therapeutic navel-gazing—animator reconstructs his own memories in CGI as a metaphor for dementia—but Simou actually inverts the sentimental trap by letting the digital medium do the emotional work; the glitches and imprecision of animation become the point, not the memory.
A formally rigorous essay film that understands its place in the lineage of personal documentary and digital abstraction, where the choice to render memory through CGI's inherent imperfection becomes both method and argument—the craft and the subject collapse into one.
The decision to use animation's technical limitations—its artifacts, its approximations—as the actual language of dementia rather than trying to represent it realistically, transforms a modest personal project into something that justifies every frame of its six minutes.