The Role
2025 · 10m · USA
Directed by Paolo Chianta
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A cook is recruited to play the father of two children who think he looks like their actual dad, prompting him to abandon his job and move with them to the city. The arrangement curdles as the siblings start second-guessing their casting choice.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Ballpoint pen animation. That's it, that's the pitch. The fact that it's also a melancholy fable about being miscast as somebody's dad is gravy.
Hand-drawn entirely in ballpoint pen gives every frame the texture of a notebook margin, and a cook recruited to play a stranger's father in a film is a perfectly strange premise. Chianta found a form that matches the content.
Hand-drawn entirely in ballpoint pen gives every frame the texture of a notebook margin doodled in a slow shift — that's the right medium for a story about a cook miscast as a charismatic father. Quiet medium for a quiet identity crisis.