Triptych
2018 · 8m · United Kingdom
Directed by Katia Lom
Genres: animation, documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
An experimental documentary hybrid in which a daughter empties her late father's home, using vintage objects and animation to explore time, memory, and generational trauma.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The hybrid doc-animation thing feels obligatory—like she needed a formal hook to make the grief legible—but there's something genuinely unsettling about how the objects refuse to stay still, how memory keeps glitching. It's the one moment where the experiment stops performing and actually *haunts*.
Lom positions herself squarely in the lineage of essay-film and archival autobiography (think Péter Forgács, Harun Farocki), but the decision to animate rather than simply restage gives her inherited form a real stake—each drawn frame becomes a deliberate act of remaking what's already gone.
The animating of those vintage objects is the whole film—it's the choice that transforms what could've been standard archival processing into something tactile and strange, each object suddenly weighted with her hand, her interpretation, rather than left to silent documentation.
Reviews
Layered images of mementos, photographs, and drawings, accentuated by a psychologically resonant soundtrack, build to a profound expression of the feelings that accompany the death of a loved one. It is so poignantly evoked that I honestly have no words to match it.