No Fish Where to Go
2014 · 12m · Canada
Directed by Nicola Lemay, Janice Nadeau
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
When violence erupts between rival groups in her village, a young girl flees with her mother and her pet fish in search of safety.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects war films to escalate into spectacle or moral reckoning—this one just... leaves. The subversion isn't in the plot twist; it's in the refusal to give you one, letting a goldfish become the last thing worth protecting when everything else burns.
The film sits deliberately in the lineage of intimate war narratives, particularly in its debt to the patient, observational animation tradition of NFB studio work—its formal restraint and the measured pacing of flight become the form itself, resisting the documentary impulse to explain.
The decision to anchor the entire emotional weight on that small, living creature—a pet fish that survives displacement—transforms what could've been a heavy-handed allegory into something achingly specific; it's the constraint that makes it work, the one detail that makes flight feel real.