What I Forgot To Say
2015 · 8m · Germany
Directed by Patrick Buhr
Genres: animation, experimental
Tones: contemplative, surreal, whimsical
A flâneur and idle daydreamer attempts to explain what purposeless walking is about and how he became what he is, narrated by a wandering voice that drifts through bizarre association and fragmented imagination until he realizes he talks the way he walks.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Most shorts about aimlessness bore me—but Buhr's decision to let the narration *become* the walk, to make form and content mirror each other down to the sentence structure, is genuinely subversive; it's a film that doesn't just talk about indecision, it *is* indecisive in ways that matter.
There's a lineage here—the flâneur essay, the animated diary, the essayistic short—but Buhr's restraint in treating association as architecture, building something coherent from seemingly random imagery, shows real formal maturity and places him in conversation with the best of contemporary poetic nonfiction.
The masterstroke isn't the concept; it's that Buhr animated his own thoughts from train journeys rather than illustrating a finished script, so the visual rhythm—those stutters, loops, and false starts in the imagery—actually *feels* like thinking, and that one choice elevates the whole thing from clever premise to something that breathes.
Reviews
A delightfully weird and tangent-filled trip through the thoughts of a unique mind.
Festivals
- Animafest Zagreb 2016