Modern Alchemy
2022 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Bren López Zepeda
Genres: animation, essay film, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tender
Vivid colour sequences trace a search for self-knowledge through resilience and rebirth. Breathing pauses mark steps toward inner calm.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's aggressively tender in a way that could've been insufferable, but López Zepeda commits so hard to the breathing-as-structure idea that it almost rewires what 'experimental essay' means—which is exactly the kind of premise that makes other scouts roll their eyes and makes me sit up.
The film positions itself thoughtfully within the lineage of meditative animation and structural cinema, where constraint becomes eloquence; those breathing pauses function as both formal device and thematic throughline, revealing a filmmaker aware of what animated abstraction can accomplish that figuration cannot.
The decision to let breathing rhythm dictate the edit—not just underpin it, but *structure* it—transforms what could be polished-but-hollow colour studies into something that actually breathes, and that singular commitment to respiration as both metaphor and mechanics is what makes two minutes feel complete.