Silken
2008 · 11m · France
Directed by Yann Bertrand, Damien Serban
Genres: animation, experimental, surrealism
Tones: contemplative, sensual, surreal
A man experiences everyday life as eternal bliss inside his mother's womb, in a dreamlike blend of Butoh dance and hybrid animation.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Two French artists turn the womb into a pleasure principle so inverted it becomes almost transgressive—a rebuke to the birth-trauma industrial complex that everyone else is too polite to articulate.
Bertrand and Serban achieve something rare: a formally rigorous synthesis of Butoh's somatic restraint with hybrid animation that recalls both structural experimental cinema and the post-Miyazaki avant-garde, a lineage they wear with clear intention.
The decision to let the Butoh dancer occupy the same ontological space as the animation—neither privileged, neither illustrative—creates a disorientation that small-budget magic relies on: you can't look away because you're not sure what you're seeing.
Festivals
- Cinanima
- London International Animation Festival
- Festival du Nouveau Cinéma de Montréal
- Sarajevo Film Festival
- Seoul International Cartoon and Animation Festival
- Stockholm International Film Festival