The Sounds of Things Ablaze
2025 · 6m · Canada
Directed by Hayat Najm
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A woman walks a sidewalk carefully avoiding its cracks, her body still braced for a war that haunts her, in a charcoal-and-gold animated portrait of trauma and resilience inspired by kintsugi.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone's going to praise the kintsugi metaphor as profound, which is exactly why this film almost bores me—except Najm refuses to make trauma redemptive, keeps the body flinching on that sidewalk, won't let us have the easy catharsis. That refusal is its teeth.
The charcoal-and-gold palette isn't decoration but argument: Najm situates this squarely in the lineage of Joanna Quinn and experimental animation's conversation with embodied memory, and the formal restraint—a woman, a sidewalk, the space between—echoes the discipline of kintsugi itself, where nothing is hidden, only held.
The decision to animate the avoidance—not the trauma itself, but the body's spatial negotiation of it—transforms what could've been illustrative into something neurologically precise; you watch her nervous system make decisions the script never states.