Stitches in Time
1988 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Anne-Marie Sirois
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
Two women knit together and trade memories of neighbours, husbands, mothers, and other women who knitted, as pastel drawings and music summon the past.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Knitting circles and intergenerational memory feels like the safest possible subject, but Sirois somehow makes the domestic archive genuinely unsettling—those pastel drawings work precisely because they're *not* trying to be provocative, which makes them more disturbing than if they were.
A masterclass in the animated essay tradition: the formal restraint of the drawing style, the deliberate pacing of the knit-and-recall structure, and the film's quiet insistence that domestic craft and collective memory are forms of artistic lineage themselves—this is programming gold.
The decision to let the women's voices and the sound of needles carry the narrative weight, with the pastel drawings merely *accompanying* rather than illustrating their words, is what transforms a simple premise into something that feels both intimate and infinite.