RE/ROUTE
2026 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Gabrielle Côté
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
Animated views of familiar streets morph from car-centered spaces built around speed and private productivity toward places designed for access, gathering, and shared enjoyment. The documentary challenges assumptions built into urban planning and imagines fairer, more sustainable city life.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a doc-essay doing the obvious thing—streets bad for cars, streets good for people—which is exactly the kind of consensus-approved argument that puts me to sleep, even if the animation is doing something formally interesting with it.
Côté's morphing streets sit squarely in the essay-film lineage of strategic aesthetics and participatory design discourse, but what matters is the precision of the animation language itself—each formal shift between car-space and human-space registers as a deliberate curatorial act, the kind that rewards close viewing.
The real move here is probably a single decision about how the camera *stays* when the streets transform—whether it holds steady or follows the newly liberated pedestrians—because that choice alone tells you whether this is preaching or showing, and from the runtime and tone, I'm betting Côté found the one perspective that makes the argument feel earned rather than imposed.