Reflective Encounters

“Urška Djukić and Émilie Pigeard’s Granny’s Sexual Life is a harrowing look at how societal expectations of women can produce trauma that spans generations. The film, purportedly narrated from the perspective of someone’s grandmother, takes on a sketchy, stream-of-consciousness style of animation with lines constantly in motion, forming new shapes, new people and new memories at every moment. The frantic animation, paired with the distressing experiences regaled of physical and sexual abuse produces a viewing experience that feels all too raw and intimate.

Within this glimpse into someone’s id, characters are reduced to Freudian symbols: the maternal figure is portrayed as a bloated circle with a visible vagina, popping out children in a house that can barely hold her, while the father militaristically brandishes his cock like a rifle. But the most revealing scenes are the ones that don’t feature animation. Over a black screen, sounds of male pleasure and female anguish are overlaid for a prolonged period. Even then it’s hard to process how awful what we’re witnessing is. If there’s any respite, it’s from the real photos used in montages, starting the film with pictures of women’s hands in subservient positions and ending with their faces, allowing us to see them as independent from the men in their lives, guiding us to come to terms with the pain society has inflicted on them.”

— Matthew Chan