Nanitic
2022 · 14m · Canada
Directed by Carol Nguyen
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Nine-year-old Trang quietly observes as her aunt Ut tends to her dying grandmother, who lies in a deathbed set up in the family living room. Through a child's eyes, the film watches a Vietnamese-Canadian family confront the slow departure of its matriarch, drawing a quiet metaphor between the household and an ant colony that must survive the loss of its queen.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects the grandmother's death to be the film's center of gravity, but Nguyen's actually interested in something weirder—using ant biology as a structural skeleton for family collapse, which should feel gimmicky but somehow doesn't, and that refusal to sentimentalize the metaphor is genuinely disarming.
The film's formal restraint—holding the camera at Trang's eye level, letting the ant colony narration emerge as a kind of visual essay embedded in domestic space—positions it squarely in a lineage of essayistic family portraiture, with the precision of a Lucile Hadžihalilović or a Lynne Ramsay short.
The decision to filter the grandmother's dying through the observational distance of a nine-year-old, rather than seeking emotional catharsis, is what makes it work—that single tonal choice transforms what could be maudlin into something almost entomological, where restraint becomes the whole architecture.
Reviews
The perspective of the children feels incredibly authentic, managing to avoid seeming naive even from an adult's point of view.
Festivals
- Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) — Short Cuts 2022, Share Her Journey Award
- TIFF Canada's Top Ten 2022
- Berlinale Generation Kplus, Germany — Official Selection 2023
- International Short Film Festival Oberhausen — Official Selection 2023
- Aspen Shortfest — Official Selection 2023