Souvenir Souvenir
2020 · 15m · France
Directed by Bastien Dubois
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, provocative
For ten years, filmmaker Bastien Dubois attempts to make a movie out of his grandfather's Algerian war souvenirs, confronting historical denial and family taboo.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A ten-year formal essay about colonial guilt and family silence could've been tedious navel-gazing, but Dubois keeps sabotaging the earnestness—mixing animation, objects, absence, and refusal in ways that actively resist a clean conclusion, which is the only honest move.
Dubois positions himself in a lineage of essayistic filmmakers confronting historical trauma through material culture and fragmented form, and the rigor of his refusal—what he won't animate, what he won't explain—becomes the film's most formally sophisticated gesture.
The decision to animate the souvenirs themselves rather than illustrate memories creates this uncanny thing where objects gain presence precisely by being rendered artificial, a single formal choice that does all the work of making complicity visible.
Reviews
*Souvenir Souvenir* is an important film in this context. Bastien Dubois' introspective, retrospective animated documentary is born of a determination to say *Never Again*, and to mean it.