Portrait
2014 · 2m · Italy
Directed by Donato Sansone
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
A slow, surreal chain of transformations turns ordinary portraits into grotesque, nightmarish faces. Donato Sansone's pictorial experiment makes still faces crawl and morph into a hypnotic world of dreams and monsters.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two minutes of faces melting into each other sounds like student work, but Sansone's refusing the easy grotesque—there's restraint here, a commitment to morphing as portraiture rather than spectacle, which is exactly the kind of formal stubbornness most scouts would dismiss.
Sansone positions himself in a lineage of surrealist animation and morphological study—Švankmajer, early Quay—but the rigor is in the editing: each transformation holds just long enough to register as *portrait* before dissolving, a meditation on identity's instability rendered through classical technique.
The entire film turns on a single production choice: holding each morphed face static for a beat before the next shift, which transforms the piece from animation spectacle into something genuinely uncanny and contemplative—the restraint is doing all the work.
Reviews
Un film hypnotisant et lancinant qui crée tout un monde de cauchemars d'après quelques portraits ordinaires.