Her Brother's Memory Was Eroding. She Animated the Blur.
Šimon, the brother of Prague-based filmmaker Nora Štrbová, developed a brain tumour that gradually eroded his memory before ultimately taking his life in his 20s; her mixed-media animation S P A C E S is based on his life.
The film leans on fragmentation to evoke that erosion: reimagined moments from Šimon's life and an interview with his friend break apart and blur, standing in for his faltering experience of time and, by extension, of himself.
Underneath sits the question the piece poses outright: to what extent is our identity intertwined with memory? A film that keeps dissolving its own images has a fair claim on answering that formally rather than in narration.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Animation earns its place here. A medium that redraws, divides and reassembles its frames can show a self coming apart, where a conventional portrait would smooth the whole thing into a story with a beginning and an end.
A film that literally blurs is also a diagram of forgetting, and diagrams have a habit of turning a person into a thesis. The blurring only moves me if something recognisable is still being taken apart on screen.