Trona Pinnacles
2021 · 13m · France
Directed by Mathilde Parquet
Genres: animation, drama, family
Tones: contemplative, surreal, tense
Nineteen-year-old Gabrielle is stranded near Death Valley on a road trip between her two estranged parents, as simmering family tension builds against the vast, unforgiving desert — until an unexpected event unravels them all.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Hockney-loose watercolor and subjective-headspace sound design saving what's otherwise a Sundance-shaped divorce-road-trip script. The medium is doing the heavy lifting and I'll take it.
Parquet's watercolor mark-making cites Hockney and Nolde, and the subjective sound design recalls the interior cinema of Lynne Ramsay; the Death Valley setting promises a Wenders-adjacent loneliness. Promising on every formal register.
Watercolor mark-making borrowed from Hockney and Nolde paired with subjective sound design that scales up tiny irritants — that's a precise sensory translation of teenage car-trip claustrophobia. The Death Valley scale against the family-tension intimacy is a smart compositional contrast.
Reviews
The location choice helps to mirror the heat of the family's tension... the impressive sound design echoes her headspace in an incredibly effective way.
The film uses gorgeous drenched watercolor for the landscapes, deeply atmospheric... a sense of the landscape functioning as a place where wounds may heal.
Festivals
- Festival Premiers Plans, Angers 2021, Grand Prix of the Jury
- New Orleans Film Festival 2021, Jury Award for Animated Shorts
- Animakom Festival, Bilbao, Special Mention
- Zabut Festival, Best Short Film