Top Priority
1981 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Ishu Patel
Genres: animation, satire, war
Tones: dark, melancholic, provocative
In a drought-stricken unspecified country, a family waits desperately for irrigation pipes and a pump, only to be passed over when a military convoy arrives bound for a border war.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Patel's watching a country starve while the state apparatus vanishes toward war—it's bleakly funny and formally savage, but the satire lands a little too neatly; I wanted it weirder, less legible.
A disciplined animated essay that inherits from political cinema and Cold War-era NFB social documentaries, with every frame of visual economy in service of an argument about resource allocation and state indifference—Patel's best work in how deliberately it refuses to sentimentalize.
The choice to animate this instead of shoot it live strips away any possibility of emotional manipulation; the flat, methodical style of the pump and pipes becoming more 'real' than the family waiting for them is the entire film, and it's a single correct decision.