Solid Ground
2022 · 2m · Canada
Directed by Beatriz Carvalho
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
An expatriate returns to a native country and records impressions in monotype animation. Home feels simultaneously familiar and foreign throughout the travelogue.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's formally restrained enough to feel almost precious—monotype animation as a homecoming essay is exactly the kind of worthy premise that makes most people nod politely. But there's something genuinely disorienting about watching a place become unfamiliar through pure mark-making; the surrealism sneaks up on you because it refuses to announce itself.
Carvalho's decision to marry the essay film tradition with monotype's inherent impermanence creates a rigorous formal argument about return and estrangement—each mark both document and dissolution. It's the kind of craft decision that positions itself squarely in a lineage of experimental documentary while feeling entirely its own.
The monotype process itself becomes the film's argument: each single-impression print mirrors the impossible task of capturing a place that shifts between memory and present tense. That one technical choice—treating animation as inherently unrepeatable—is what transforms a travel essay into something that actually *means* something about displacement.