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Animation Movies Shorts

A Mind Sang
(A Mãe
De Sangue)

Director – Vier Nev – 2019 – Portugal – 6m 11s

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In the programme Annecy Awards 2020 – 8 Short Films #2 from the Annecy 2021 Animation Festival hybrid and online editions

This is not a film to watch once. It’s a film to watch over and over and over again. It comprises a series of hugely affecting double images, double meanings. Am I looking at an eye or a person swimming / drowning? A man descending from the sky of a hand pulling a pencil out of water? The profile of a face with eyes and nose of the full length figure of a man sleeping, his head on a pillow?

Double images like this have always worked well in static art or illustration (there’s a famous one of Sigmund Freud’s face which can be read equally easily as a naked woman) while animation – in this case, 2D animation, but it applies to other forms of the medium as well – has a long tradition of portraying transformation of one object or physical state into another. This clever and subtle little film combines the two legacies.

A woman’s hand drawing becomes a person sitting in a bathtub becomes a woman lying prone (in water? On solid ground?). A tableau of faces lit from one side becomes a tableau of embryos. Single images suddenly split into two images and you realise that you’re watching a naked couple kiss or embrace, even as their kissing heads transform into an embryo before your eyes.

From its opening, the film augments all this with slowly lengthening straight lines to lend a kinetic, graphic identity to the whole.

What’s it all about? Male, female, identity, creativity, sex, pregnancy, life, birth, violence.

All of it beautifully scored by Yanis El Masri’s original, evocative, ethereal, otherworldly music.

A Mind Sang plays in the Annecy Animation Festival 2021 which is taking place right now in a special online edition this year as part of the Annecy Awards 2020 – 8 Short Films #2 from the Annecy 2021 Online Animation Festivals.

Here it is in 2020 winning the Vimeo Staff Pick Award:

As part of the Vimeo Staff Pick Award, the film is now available to view on Vimeo:

Festivals

2021

Annecy Animation Festival special hybrid and online editions:

Monday, June 14th to Saturday, June 19th.

Festival Trailer:

2020

Annecy Animation Festival special online edition:

Monday, June 15th to Tuesday, June 30th.

Festival trailer:

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