Stacy 我朋友的故事
2025 · 9m · Taiwan
Directed by Lin Yi-ling
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A young Taiwanese animator searches—in dreams and waking life—for one more conversation with a close friend lost to suicide, weaving private memory and the streets of Tainan into an act of goodbye.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most grief films are maudlin exercises in self-indulgence, but Lin's decision to embed her friend's memory in Tainan's actual geography—turning a city into a palimpsest of private loss—is genuinely subversive: it refuses to perform sadness and instead lets landscape do the emotional work.
A formally precise meditation on animation as elegy, situating itself squarely in the lineage of autobiographical experimental animation while honoring the Japanese *monogatari* tradition of intimate storytelling; the weaving of street scenes and Easter eggs demonstrates rigorous control over visual metaphor.
The choice to anchor abstract emotional searching in specific Tainan locations—rendering grief as a geography rather than an interior—is the decision that transforms this from personal therapy into something universal, and the animation's restraint in following that single formal commitment makes every frame count.
Festivals
- CinemaSHORT Asian Short Film Competition 2025, Best Animated Short Film