“Maybe Elephants” shortlisted for Academy Award for Animated Short Film

Maybe Elephants marks the fourth collaboration of the NFB and Norway’s Mikrofilm AS with Torill Kove, a Norwegian-born filmmaker and animator based in Montreal. Three of her films (including My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts and Me and My Moulton) have been nominated for Academy Awards, with The Danish Poet, narrated by Liv Ullmann, winning the coveted golden statue in 2007. Kove’s films are known for her expressive designs and playful and poignant autobiographical themes.

This shortlist selection is the latest honour for Torill Kove, who recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from SPARK ANIMATION in Vancouver, Western Canada’s largest animation fest. Since its world premiere at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France, the film has been selected by more than 30 festivals around the world.

The film tells the story of her formative teenage years growing up in a loving family who must suddenly navigate the strong pull of individual needs. The family, consisting of parents and three sisters, swaps a safe and predictable life in Norway for the vibrant unknowns of 1970s Nairobi, Kenya.

Featuring the return cast from Kove’s previous work, Me and My Moulton, the film explores the many ripples flowing from a mother’s restlessness and how this impacts her family.

Kove views this film as a sequel to her 2015 short Me and My Moulton, which provided a semi-biographical snapshot of her family in the 1960s, when she and her sisters were under ten years old and their parents were young and hip. In Maybe Elephants, she revisits the same family dynamic in a playful and loving autobiographical homage to family, adolescence and the therapeutic power of memories, however unreliable.

Despite her concerns about telling a story set in Kenya, given that she is not Kenyan herself, Kove felt it was essential to remain true to a chapter of her family’s life that took place there. Throughout the production, she engaged in dialogue with Kenyan Canadians in Montreal, who played the roles of Kenyan characters and with whom Kove consulted on Swahili language and Kenyan culture.