Soif
2014 · 8m · Canada
Directed by Michèle Cournoyer
Genres: animation, drama, experimental
Tones: dark, melancholic, surreal
A woman's entire existence revolves around drinking, moving through parties, binges, fleeting pleasure, and delirium as childhood memories surface, until her addiction threatens to pull her under completely.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Cournoyer's doing something genuinely perverse here—animating addiction as this hallucinatory blur of parties and childhood ghosts instead of making it a tragedy you're *supposed* to feel. It's too formally restrained to be exploitative, too queasy to be cathartic, and that refusal to settle is exactly why it works.
A formally rigorous piece that situates itself in a lineage of experimental animation examining psychological dissolution—think early Švankmajer meets NFB's own tradition of intimate abstraction. The restraint in Cournoyer's line work and the precision of when she lets the image fray is the kind of craft decision programmers will argue about for years.
The singular move here is the decision to animate the memories in a completely different register—softer, more figurative—so when they start bleeding into the present-tense delirium, you feel the rupture in your body before your brain catches up. That one formal choice does the entire emotional work.