Flow

“Flow might be a digital confection, but it’s also open, alive, elemental. In every sense, it’s a breath of fresh air.”~Robbie Collin, The Telegraph

Aroview: A nameless, wordless cat survives an apocalyptic flood and forms a kinship with a dog, a capybara, a lemur and a bird in a lush, animated fantasia that has become the all-time box-office champ in its native Latvia and also won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in 2025.

Like last year’s “Robot Dreams”, it’s a film of pure visual storytelling, only with the animals behaving true to the nature of their species and yet double as avatars for human personality types or nationalities trying to find common ground. Animated using open-source software in the hands of director Gints Zilbalodis, it’s a testament to the democratized tools of technology with an against-the-odds creation story as endearing as the story it tells.

NZ International Film Festival 2024