Aphasia

Both striking and unsettling, Aphasia is a deeply moving foray into the heart of a devastating neurocognitive condition, one that progressively destroys the ability to speak and understand words, afflicting many people who have Alzheimer’s disease.

Propelled by a jarring, lyrical aesthetic, the film pulls viewers into a disconcerting sensory experience. Visuals and sounds multiply and are superimposed on each other. Images collide as the voice of the narrator, Clare Coulter, dissolves into echoes. Meanwhile, startling glitch effects shatter the clean lines of the images.

In her debut professional animated short, Marielle Dalpé is not content to simply evoke the world of language dysfunction. Instead, she fully immerses us in it. The film allows us to feel what it must be like to engage in a battle with time and the limits of our own minds, while everything seems to be slipping away…

This powerful and important work highlights the ambiguous fragility of existence, and reminds us of that which makes us uniquely human: our ability to communicate.

A poetic tour-de-force with universal resonance, Aphasia encourages both individual and collective reflection.