The Bus Trip
2017 · 14m · Israel
Directed by Sarah Gampel
Genres: animation, drama, essay film
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
Sarah is invited to show her film in Israel as part of a film festival bus trip.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
An essay film dressed up in animation that could've been unbearably earnest, but Gampel commits to the bit—mixing contemplation with dark comedy in a way that shouldn't work but somehow does, and that refusal to pick a lane is exactly the kind of genre-bending perversity I live for.
The formal rigor here is in the restraint: animation as a vessel for personal essay rather than spectacle, situating itself somewhere between Chbosky's formal experimentation and the contemporary essay-film lineage, with considered pacing that honors both the animated medium and the vulnerability of the form.
What elevates this from a sketch into something necessary is Gampel's decision to let the animation *breathe*—the choice to strip away excess and let the darkly comic moments land through stillness and negative space rather than motion, which is the opposite of what animation usually does and why it works.
Reviews
Her films tell personal stories that often relate to specific political issues. Her work has been shown at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, the La Havana International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Cuba, as well as at film events in New York City, Givat Olga, and Ramallah.