Tying Your Own Shoes
2009 · 16m · Canada
Directed by Shira Avni
Genres: animation, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Four adult artists with Down syndrome - Petra, Matthew, Daninah and Katherine - reflect in an animated documentary on their pasts, relationships, ambitions and how it feels to be seen as different.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the disability doc to be either inspiration-porn or heavy-handed tragedy, so Avni just... lets four artists talk about their lives like they're people, which somehow feels radical and obvious at once—the subversion is in the refusal to perform.
The marriage of rotoscoped animation to first-person testimony creates a formal tension that recalls the essay film tradition of Marker and Akerman: how do we represent interiority without flattening it, and what does the animated body add that live action cannot?
The decision to animate rather than film directly—letting the subjects' own drawn gestures and movement choices carry their testimonies—transforms what could be a standard interview into something tactile and authored, where every line is theirs.