What is the film about?

While sheltering from rocket fire, Lily tries to reach her best friend, Keren. As their connection fades, she retreats into a dreamlike world of memory, music, and longing.

What influenced it?

Our biggest influences were films that blur the boundaries between reality, memory, and emotional experience, including Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman), Melancholia (Lars von Trier), and Midsommar ( Ari Aster) . We were drawn to the way these films use atmosphere, visual symbolism, and shifting environments to externalize inner emotional states. Rather than portraying trauma literally, we wanted to express anxiety, longing, and uncertainty through evolving spaces, changing color palettes, and music-driven storytelling.

A little background information...

Final Chord was created as our graduation film at the University of Haifa. Following the October 7, 2023 terrorist attack, we felt a need to process the shock, grief, and uncertainty that affected our lives and community through the medium we know best: animation.

Through the story of Lily and Keren, two close friends suddenly separated by tragedy, we explored how memory, imagination, and music can become a refuge when reality becomes overwhelming. The film was also shaped by the loss of our classmate, Inbar Hayman, who was abducted from the Nova Festival and later murdered in captivity. While the story is fictional, her memory became an emotional foundation for the project.

Ultimately, we wanted to create a film about friendship, absence, and the emotional spaces people inhabit when faced with uncertainty and loss.

How was the film made?

Final Chord was produced over ten months as our graduation project. We developed the story, animation, visual language, and editing ourselves, while collaborating closely with composers Yonatan Jakob and Benzi Illuz.

A central creative decision was to tell the story through space as much as through character. Lily moves between a student apartment, a claustrophobic shelter, a spiraling staircase, and dreamlike neon landscapes. As her emotional state shifts, these environments gradually transform, reflecting her inner world.

Color became one of our primary storytelling tools. Through gradients, lighting transitions, and evolving palettes, we mirrored Lily’s journey from safety and connection to anxiety, uncertainty, and longing.

Music functions as both memory and narrative throughout the film. Its central theme begins as an expression of friendship, youth, and celebration, inspired by the atmosphere of the Nova Festival. As the story unfolds, the same melody gradually takes on a different meaning, becoming a reflection of absence and longing. This transformation mirrors one of the film’s central ideas: how a place created to celebrate life can suddenly become inseparable from tragedy and loss.