Get your handkerchiefs ready for the delightful animated film that has already conquered the Cannes Film Festival and now the Rome Film Festival, where it has just been presented in the parallel Alice in the City section.
Flow – A World to Save is released in Italian theaters on November 7 (distributed by Teodora Film) and arrives in special screenings on the 22nd in New York and Los Angeles before debuting in U.S. theaters on December 6.
It is signed (almost entirely) by Latvian Gints Zilbalodis, who, just 30 years old, is poised to become the new “golden boy” of international animation cinema. A self-taught filmmaker who made his first short film at the age of 17 and won the world’s most important animation festival, Annecy, at 25, presenting his first feature film, Away, of which he was producer, director, screenwriter, animator, editor, cinematographer and even composer.
Flow is his second film and features a very tender black cat (with whom you will fall in love at first sight) living in an uninhabited house in the middle of a forest populated only by animals. It is unclear what has happened to the humans (the cat’s owner himself seems to have left his house in a hurry, his bed unmade, his everyday objects abandoned), but soon a flood comes along and submerges the countryside reaching as far as the roof of the house. So our feline has no choice but to find refuge in a drifting boat, and he will have to face a series of adventures together with a small band of other animals, all different from each other.
Without any narrative voice and without a single word being spoken throughout the film, Flow (which after all means “flow,” and refers to the flow of water, but also, metaphorically, of emotions) succeeds in moving the viewer with the purity of its story, whose protagonists are innocent creatures struggling for their own survival in a fantastical, apocalyptic world. With a bittersweet ending, reminding us how all change always brings with it victors and losers.
“I think animation can go deeper into viewers’ subconscious than a film shot live. Animation is not influenced by cultural or language barriers; it can be much more universal and primal. But at the same time, I don’t think it should be seen as something different. It’s just another narrative technique,” Zilbalodis explains.
And again, “Not everything is explained in the film, for example, we don’t know why the flood comes, but the goal was not to create a puzzle to be solved, but to offer the audience an entire experience to embrace, an open-ended film that continues to make us think after we see it.”
At the moment Flow is also already considered among the favorites in the running for the upcoming Academy Awards.
The article <i>Flow – A World to Save</i>: Gints Zilbalodis’ moving animated film comes to theaters from TheNewyorker.
