The View
2024 · 18m · Sweden
Directed by Alli Sadegiani
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
In 1980s Sweden, an immigrant boy navigates isolation, bullying and prejudice while finding refuge in video games, a secret friendship and his admiration for Prince. A deeply personal, semi-autobiographical search for identity, belonging and acceptance.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A Pixar insider deliberately unsanding his own work—stripping the polish, mixing animation with live-action, making something *messier* than his day job demands—is exactly the kind of self-sabotage that interests me, even if the melancholy earnestness plays it safe.
Sadegiani's hybrid form sits in productive conversation with experimental animation lineage (Waltz with Bashir, A Ghost Story), and the restraint in refusing to overcomplicate his own story reads as formally sophisticated—a supervisor who knows when NOT to deploy his toolkit.
The decision to animate only fragments of memory while keeping present-day Sweden in live-action isn't just a budget choice—it's the entire emotional architecture, making abstraction feel like the texture of forgetting, and that single formal move elevates what could've been a standard immigrant-kid narrative into something spatially precise.
Reviews
The jury gave a special mention to the Swedish short The View, directed by Alli Sadegiani.
An award-winning, poetic and deeply personal exploration of identity and belonging, told through the eyes of a child growing up in 1980s Sweden to immigrant parents.
Festivals
- SCHLiNGEL International Film Festival 2025, Winner — Best International Animated Short
- Animotion Film Festival 2025, Winner — Best 2D Animation and Best Soundtrack
- Big Syn International Film Festival 2025, Winner — Best International Animation
- Festival Internacional de Cine de Lanzarote 2025, Special Mention
- Bengaluru International Short Film Festival 2025
- Animation Dingle 2025
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2025
- Nordisk Panorama 2025
- Tallgrass Film Festival 2025