Underplayed Gems

In the Shadow of the Pines (2020)

In the Shadow of the Pines poster
Country
Canada
Rated
G
Rating
10.0 of 10 from 1 voters
Elsewhere
IMDb
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How it feels

In this animated short, the filmmaker imagines a conversation with her late father about her childhood shame that he worked as a janitor at her school. She explores her grief and their relationship through this memory.

personalmelancholicreflectiveintimatequietemotionalpoignantslow-paced

What happens

In the Shadow of the Pines is a Canadian animated short documentary film, directed by Anne Koizumi and released in 2020. An exploration of her grief around the death of her father in the early 2010s, the film centres on an imagined conversation with him about her childhood shame that he was employed as the janitor at her school, thus exposing her to her classmates as the daughter of a working class immigrant. Although Koizumi is an administrative employee of the National Film Board of Canada, she made the film independently rather than through her employer. The film was screened at numerous documentary and animation film festivals in 2020 and 2021, and was added to CBC Gem. It received an honorable mention for the Betty Youson Award for Best Canadian Short Documentary at the 2020 Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, won the awards for Best Narrative Short and Best Canadian Animation at the 2020 Ottawa International Animation Festival, and won the award for Best Animated Short at the 2021 San Francisco International Film Festival. The film was a Prix Iris nominee for Best Animated Short Film at the 23rd Quebec Cinema Awards. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

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