Sauna
2021 · 4m · Switzerland
Directed by Anna Lena Spring, Lara Perren
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, sensual, surreal
Ava takes her first sauna and, overwhelmed by naked bodies, heat and glances, begins to relax until she melts away and dissolves into total ecstasy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age film about vulnerability that actually *becomes* vulnerability instead of performing it—the moment she stops resisting and starts dissolving is genuinely unhinged in the best way, and most directors would've chickened out and kept her metaphorically intact.
Spring and Perren situate bodily self-consciousness within a lineage of animation-as-psychological-space that reaches back through Joanna Quinn and into the experimental avant-garde, executing the formal dissolution with the kind of considered restraint that separates intuition from craft.
The decision to animate the moment of ecstatic release as literal dissolution—pooling, merging, the body becoming formless—is so precise and economical that it does in four minutes what takes other films twice the runtime; it's the single choice that makes the whole premise breathe.