Tears of the Mountain
2025 · 8m · France
Directed by Luke Ashworth, Yehor Bondarenko, Alp Kurdoglu, Romane Talva, Ange Yajima
Genres: adventure, animation, fantasy
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
Jaya sets out to hunt the mountain spirit, a sacred beast with valuable feathers, but is interrupted by her younger sister Amala, who is devoted to protecting it.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Five directors and it still feels like a whisper instead of a manifesto — the film's restraint is almost perverse, refusing the obvious spectacle of a spirit hunt for something quieter and weirder about sisters and possession.
The mythic register sits comfortably within a lineage of animated fables, but what distinguishes this is the formal precision of how the feathers become both object and abstraction, the editing treating sacred iconography with genuine weight.
Watch how the sound design separates Jaya's hunting purpose from Amala's protective presence — it's not the animation that sells the emotional pivot, it's the decision to let silence and breath do the work of transformation.
Reviews
Two excellent new animated short films to watch created by students at the prestigious Gobelins animation school based in Paris. The first is a 7-minute short titled Tears of the Mountain, about two girls going out on a hunt into the snowy wilderness where they encounter an ancient beast that's connected to the spirits of the mountain.