QAmom
2021 · 8m · USA
Directed by awesome and modest
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
Sean Donnelly, an animator and filmmaker, documents his mother's descent into QAnon conspiracy theories — covering 5G, the plandemic, and QAnon — through candid interviews and a live-action documentary format that became a viral phenomenon, reaching the front page of Reddit and spawning a full Vox podcast episode.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A son films his mother being absorbed by QAnon and edits it into eight minutes — the most disturbing short of 2021 with no special effects budget required.
Sean Donnelly turning the camera on his QAnon-radicalized mother is the kind of intimate documentary that makes the political crisis legible because it's domestic — Stories We Tell adjacent, with stakes Sarah Polley didn't have to face.
Sean Donnelly turning his own mother's QAnon descent into a documentary is the kind of premise that's either devastating or exploitative, and the eight-minute runtime suggests he knew when to cut. Front-page-of-Reddit virality usually means it landed.