The Storm
2021 · 4m · Canada
Directed by Monica Kidd
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A doctor and filmmaker expecting a baby during the COVID-19 pandemic reflects, with sparse animated imagery, on hope and uncertainty about the world her child will enter.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a pregnancy diary dressed up in animation—sincere, well-intentioned, and exactly the kind of personal essay that usually puts me to sleep, even if the pandemic framing tries to give it stakes.
Kidd moves between documentary and animated reflection with the precision of someone fluent in both languages; the restraint of the visual vocabulary becomes the film's argument about uncertainty, positioning it squarely in the lineage of essay films that use form to resist easy answers.
The choice to let the animation stay *sparse*—to leave most of the image empty rather than filled—is what separates this from a thousand other pandemic-baby reflections; that negative space does the emotional work better than any rendered detail could.