Tombes & manèges
2015 · 7m · Francia
Directed by Alexandre Garnier, Ambre Pochet, Antoine Giuliani, Jérémie Auray, Marc Visintin, Nicolas Albrecht, Sandrine Normand
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, whimsical
In an isolated cemetery, a gravedigger tries to entertain his young son. His efforts to amuse the boy take a foolish turn.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Seven directors collaborating on a gravedigger dad-joke routine in a cemetery—the premise alone is deliciously perverse, and the film commits fully to the absurdist logic most shorts would shy away from. This is exactly the kind of subversive little oddity that makes you laugh and squirm simultaneously.
The tonal precision here is remarkable: Garnier et al. navigate the needle between whimsy and dread with the deliberation of a formal exercise, and the animation style recalls a lineage of European dark fable that knows exactly what register it's working in.
The decision to shoot the father's increasingly desperate improvisation—each comedic misstep building on the last—with that particular restraint in the boy's reaction creates all the tension this small narrative needs; it's a film that trusts the spacing between moments to do the work.