Meneath: The Hidden Island of Ethics
2021 · 19m · Canada
Directed by Terril Calder
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, tender
A Métis baby girl convinced she is soiled and destined for Hell confronts abuse and the contrast between the Seven Deadly Sins and the Seven Sacred Teachings, finding strength and a path toward healing.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most scouts would shy away from a film this directly engaged with spiritual trauma and Indigenous pedagogy—too earnest, too didactic—which is exactly why Calder's refusal to sentimentalize the collision between Catholic sin-doctrine and Métis sacred teaching feels genuinely radical.
Calder situates this film within a lineage of animated autobiography and spiritual portraiture (think Joanna Quinn, Beetlejuice the Ghost, the Canadian avant-garde's reckoning with institutional violence), but the formal choice to pit the Seven Deadly Sins against the Seven Sacred Teachings as competing visual and moral architectures suggests a filmmaker thinking rigorously about how animation itself can hold contradiction.
The singular move here is how Calder uses animation not for escape but as a language precise enough to render a child's theological confusion without flinching—the decision to animate rather than document this story becomes the film's argument about visibility and voice.