Mitã'i Churi
2024 · 6m · Argentina
Directed by Elian Guerin
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, war
Tones: contemplative, dark, melancholic
A Guaraní boy is recruited by the army after his village loses its soldiers, lured by promises of glory and forced to face war's destruction of childhood.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects war films to traffic in trauma and moral reckoning—Guerin just animates a child's recruitment and lets the formal restraint do the subversion, refusing the catharsis other directors would demand.
A disciplined meditation on institutional predation dressed in animation; the tonal control here—melancholic without sentimentality, dark without spectacle—places Guerin in conversation with the best of festival animation, where form becomes argument.
The choice to animate rather than live-act a child soldier narrative reframes the entire moral weight: abstraction becomes an act of protection, and that single formal decision transforms what could've been exploitation into something genuinely urgent.