Palmipédarium

The scouts

A follow-up to Skhizein that could've been a safe victory lap—instead Clapin makes a film about *knowing ducks* and somehow lands somewhere between Buñuel and a fever dream; it's perverse in the best way, refusing the obvious move at every turn.

Clapin's return after nearly a decade arrives with the formal precision of a director who understands animation as a lineage, not a medium—every surreal beat calibrated, every cut earned, the kind of measured strangeness that positions itself deliberately within experimental tradition.

The decision to anchor surrealism in the banal specificity of one man's duck knowledge—that granular obsession as the emotional core—is what separates this from mere formal play; it's the kind of constraint that forces everything else into sharp focus.

Reviews

With Clapin recently admitting in an interview that he wanted his latest film to really make the audience feel somewhat uncomfortable, the dialogue-free Palmipédarium seems more intent on creating atmosphere than weaving a complex, multi-layered plot. Possibly his oddest film yet, a statement Skhizein fans may find unimaginable, Palmipédarium seems to announce a slight detour from the director's previous short film work.