“Flow”, the cinema like a shelter

With Flow, Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis presents his vision of a Noah’s Ark deprived of human presence, with a cat as the main protagonist of this adventure tale. There’s no anthropomorphism in Flow, but the story’s progress seems to be freed from classic narrative stakes, tightened around primary elements – survival and the relationship with others, the sense of community. While Gints Zilbalodis sustains the feline’s destiny with a creative solitude that echoes his own – reduced, in this second film, with more substantial teamwork – he constantly favors the practical, sensory experience of his animals. Flow thus gives the impression of wandering through a video game’s open world, having substituted its camera for a joystick. The film takes on this role, by opting for an animation that doesn’t try to erase its artifice, making the movement of elements as fluid as they are jerky. Following on from Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail and Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s Eat the Night, Flow attests to that same tropism for a virtual world resembling a shelter. 

Traduction Emma Frigo