Vandpyt
2024 · 8m · Denmark
Directed by Maria-May Backhaus Brown, Mads Theodor Bonde
Genres: animation, coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
A girl is the last to be collected from nursery as water seeping into the house brings her family's tension to a head.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the water metaphor to do the heavy lifting, but Backhaus Brown and Bonde refuse the obvious—they let the kid's boredom and neglect speak louder than any symbolic drowning, which is genuinely unsettling in a way most shorts aren't brave enough to attempt.
The restraint here is remarkable: a formally precise animation that treats domestic rupture with the same compositional care as a Koreeda camera, letting negative space and the geometry of avoidance carry what lesser films would spell out in dialogue.
The decision to keep the girl's face largely obscured or still while everything around her (the water, the parents' voices, the waiting) becomes the active element—that single formal choice transforms what could've been a generic anxiety parable into something genuinely disquieting and singular.
Festivals
- ITFS Stuttgart 2025