No Offense
2016 · 6m · Belgium
Directed by Kris Borghs
Genres: animation, dark comedy, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
A line of cartoonists is forced to present their work to a sinister tribunal whose easily offended members can sentence the next artist in line to immediate death. Created in response to real-world violence against political cartoonists, the film asks whether the last cartoonist can escape his fate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A cartoon tribunal executing cartoonists in real time—it's absurdist formal violence dressed up as satire, and it shouldn't work, but Borghs swings hard enough that you're genuinely unsure if the last artist makes it out alive. Refuses to wink at the audience or soften the premise, which is exactly why it lands.
Borghs situates this squarely in the tradition of political animation as witness—the wordless form echoes Walerian Borowczyk's moral parables—but the execution feels slightly underdeveloped, as though the weight of its real-world inspiration (Farzat, Charlie Hebdo) outpaces the formal rigor needed to contain it.
The choice to strip all dialogue and let the tribunal's body language and the cartoonists' gestures carry the moral weight is what transforms this from a heavy-handed concept into something that actually breathes—you feel the dread accumulate through pure animation, not exposition.
Reviews
Caricaturists are a thorn in the side for the rich and mighty.
A dystopian animation about a brutal society where cartoonists face execution for offending those in power — a response to the assault on Syrian cartoonist Ali Farzat.
Festivals
- Brussels Short Film Festival 2016
- Festival Anima 2017
- Interfilm Berlin 2016
- Skepto International Film Festival 2017, Special Award Finalist
- Bergamo Film Meeting 2017
- Quebec City Film Festival 2017
- Take One Action Film Festival 2016