What is the film about?

Set on a surreal plain of salt flats, Telsche is an abstract short film that explores memory and loss, as one girl attempts to remember someone who she has forgotten.

These concepts are reflected visually in the contrast between light and dark, in the symbolic obscuring of clouds, and in the choice of still, wide shots, wherein the subjects are barely visible, on the verge of being seen but as of yet unremembered.

Produced by the Oscar-nominated COLA Animation, Telsche premiered at Annecy Film Festival in 2023 and has just recently had its online premiere on Short of The Week. The film has screened at numerous festivals and obtained multiple awards, including Best Sound at the Oscar-qualifying Cinanima Festival.

What influenced it?

“The sea is the land’s edge…
It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,
The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar
And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,
Many gods and many voices.
The salt is on the briar rose,
The fog is in the fir trees.”
– T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (1943)

As the sea reaches toward the shore, as the salt and fog creep into the city, so do our memories wander into our present. This was the starting point for Telsche: the concept of memory encroaching onto a static world, where things have been forgotten, in the form of salt “on the briar rose”, fog “in the fir trees.” A natural object laden with memory is tossed to shore and triggers the recollection of something lost.

-Father and Daughter (2000) – Michaël Dudok de Wit

-The pillow shots of Yasujiro Ozu

A little background information...

This film was written after Sophie moved back to Hong Kong, where she was born and grew up, after spending many years in the UK. On moving back, she was reunited with the vast sea that she knew from her youth, and with this came the memories of her family, so tied to the sea. Her mother was a Japanese diver and her father an English sailor.

One of her earliest memories with her mother was of watching pearl divers in Japan. They would dip and descend in their white uniforms, without tanks of air, and collect pearls from the depths. For 3000 years, these divers have scoured the same seas. Together, across the reaches of time, but also in that individual solace that the dark sea offers. The sea remains unchanged, while human lives come and go. The sea in Telsche reflects this, as the site of memory that allows Telsche to connect with her mother, a lost diver.

These concepts of memory and forgetting therefore permeate the entire film, reflected visually in the contrast between light and dark and in the choice of still, wide shots, wherein the subjects are barely visible, on the verge of being seen but as of yet unremembered. There is also no dialogue and much is obscured, suggesting the fog of forgetting. The Mother’s face is covered by her white diver’s headscarf and goggles. Her white clothes sink into the white of her surroundings. The shadows in the salt house, the lack of light, and the salt fog all shroud identities and surroundings and truth. It is only when Telsche floods the land and descends deep into memory that colour returns and the dark is illuminated, that the world becomes unclouded and Telsche can find what she had long lost.

Speaking a little bit more about why the film was made: we are a duo of directors who specialise in 2D frame-by-frame animation. We are both members of COLA Animation, an Oscar-nominated international production cooperative dedicated to bringing to life high-quality handmade film content. Prior to this project, we had unofficially collaborated on multiple pieces of work, seeking each other’s feedback and influencing each other’s creative process. So one of the main goals of this opportunity was to formalise that collaboration and finally work together in an official capacity.

Vignettes on salt flats have come up time and again in our work. We are fascinated by nature, by time, by the abstractions of life seen in minute moments. There is the idea of salt as treacherous. The image of a baby flamingo, its legs heavy and caked in salt, struggling to cross the flats in the Serenghetti Desert in Attenbourough’s Our Planet, comes to mind. And then, on the other hand, salt gives life. Butterflies feed on the tears of animals, and elephants cross vast distances to lick salt off the walls of caves. These complexities and multiplicities of life on the salt flats, the levels of tragedy and beauty that coexist, reflect the nuance and violence and beauty of life on the salt flats, and for this reason, we are enchanted by the space. The timeless nature of an isolated land that crystallises and preserves, also lends the quality of allegory and surrealism to the salt flats, which is deeply interesting to us as a site for creative exploration.

This film therefore gave us the opportunity to explore our shared language as a duo through visual poetry and universal imagery. The sea and the tunnels of memory, the search for the forgotten and unknowable, and our eternal struggle to come to terms with the passing of time, are constants for us all. And yet, coming from different cultural backgrounds, we were fascinated by the different images and stories and memories these universal images evoked in us both. Our different perspectives helped us recontextualise and enrich our collective narrative voice, and we found the beauty in layering various levels of meaning into our work that speaks to both of us individually, as well as together. Ultimately, the film is therefore a visual poem without a single, fixed memory. The film should resonate differently depending on your own connection to the images, your own memories. However, our intention is that Telsche’s journey from isolation to connection will feel universal: although our individual experiences of love and loss may differ, the emotions themselves are shared by us all.

How was the film made?

Telsche is 2D digital, utilising some painted backgrounds and textures. Initially, we experimented a lot with painting all of our backgrounds, with the intention to infuse the texture of salt in the work. Ultimately, thanks to our producer Bruno Caetano’s suggestion, we realised that the clean 2D digital style worked best to emphasise the stark contrasts of this world. However, the strange, foreign object (the stone) that symbolises an abstract impression of the Mother’s forgotten face, is still rendered in paint in order to bring attention to the fact that it is not of this world. When Telsche descends into the deep waters, her surroundings are also painted, representing her approach towards tactile memory.

We knew from the beginning that contrast was an integral part of the style, something necessary to reflect the stark differences between the concepts of memory and the forgotten, and movement and stasis. The crisp, black shadows come from a narrative goal: that the clouds must bring obfuscation to the flats, and show how images sink into darkness and are removed from our view, reflecting how memories are lost in time. It is also not just the black colours that remove imagery and memory from us, but also the white, which similarly represents the fog of forgetting. The Mother’s face is covered by her white diver’s headscarf and goggles. Her white clothes sink into the white of her surroundings. The shadows in the salt house and on the salt flats all shroud identities and surroundings and truth.

So the contrasts reflect a narrative goal, to obscure imagery and to delineate concepts of memory and loss. In a film that is a “visual poem”, set in something of a dreamscape or a surreal world, all of the imagery that you see is considered and representative of something integral to Telsche. Contrasts and duality abound. For example, it’s a small detail, but reflective of the symbolism found in dreams: on the final island, where Telsche is reunited with her Mother, there are two intertwined plants, representing the coming together of mother and daughter.

Lastly, this crisp, contrasted white and black world is rendered like this so that the colourful world of water is all the more impactful. Alongside the crescendo in soundscape, the visual style of the film also follows ebbs and flows through the use of colour.

In terms of process, we feel that it is important to note that our collaboration took (and continues to take) place across a distance spanning thousands of kilometres and an eight-hour time difference, with Nunu in Portugal and Sophie in Hong Kong.

Although we have had some opportunities to work in the same timezone, most notably during the Rise and Shine Pitching Lab in 2022 where we were runner-up for the project In the Beginning (which just premiered at SXSW alongside a feature film with animation by the two of us — “Your Attention Please”), our collaboration on Telsche was made through daily communication online, separated by many hours of time difference.