Despite its descriptive title revealing exactly what is going to happen in Nicolas Fattouh’s surreal fable-like short, How My Grandmother Became a Chair, there’s still a lot of surprises to be found in this 10-minute film. The strange tale of an elderly matriarch who transforms, one body part at a time, into a piece of furniture, this fictional tale is grounded in reality through the director’s own experiences of losing his grandmother.
„I naively thought she would always be there, but when she passed away, I knew she was gone forever“, Fattouh explains as we discuss how his own encounters with grief inspired his storyline. The presence of his loss is rich throughout his short, as despite is surreal nature, it’s a film that packs a weighty punch in the emotional department. The grandmother’s gradual change is at first both comical and unsettling, but her final transformation is a beautiful and tender moment, that really hits in the heartstrings. – S/W Curator, Rob Munday
Credits
Director: Nicolas Fattouh
Producer: Fabian Driehorst, Nermine Haddad
Animation Director, Compositing: Till Machmer
Animation: Adrian Jaffé, Yann Le Bot, Augustina Morici, Florian Maubach, Shadi Adib, Alba Dragonetti, Carlo Palazzari, Meike Fehre, Rebecca Blöcher, Friedrich Schäper
Backgrounds: Markus Rockstroh, Nicolas Fattouh
Editing: Frédéric Schuld
Music: Cedric Kayem Sound Design: François Yazbeck Sound Supervisor: Rana Eid
https://www.fabianfred.com/how-my-grandmother-became-a-chair/