2025-08-13

Locarno review: I’m Not Sure (2025)

Oana Balaci
Animation, Festivals, Locarno, Shorts / Lord Kesseli, Luisa Zürcher, Marvin Mata, Pardi di Domani /0 Comments

Pardi di Domani
National Competition

“What do you do for a living?” – the recurrent question in I’m Not Sure seems to be the medical personnel’s favorite one. Addressed to director Luisa Zürcher over and over again when she was hospitalized for a surgery, this informal inquiry wrapped in good intentions hides misconceptions about unconventional career paths one might choose to pursue, especially in the art field.

The short animation selected in Pardi di Domani’s National Competition of the 78th Locarno Film Festival unveils the mundane tragedy of a young filmmaker bearing a tumor in her abdomen and interacting briefly with doctors and nurses in the long corridors. Her diagnostic is confessed to the audience through written words on the walls, too painful to be disclosed orally. However, Zürcher voices the small talk of all characters: every greeting, every joke, every given information.

The helmer’s detached, impersonal tone finds itself in contrast with the deeply subjective experience, perhaps reflecting a coping mechanism, one also enabled by black humor. The sketchy animation could have been drawn by hand like Walt Disney used to do – as one of the characters mentions – and is also devoid of color, except for the scenes with emotional intensity. Powerful symptoms like hallucinations and vomiting trigger visual and audio responses such as rapid movement, flashes, a background cadence and electronic music. Images of human skin are superimposed on some frames to indicate the protagonist’s challenging relationship with her new body, scared by the procedure.

Therefore, in light of this close encounter with a strong disease, maybe even death, the aforementioned question seems trivial, almost absurd. So are the people who worry whether being an animator pays the bills or not. Maybe this film’s title is Zürcher final answer, maybe she’s not sure what she does for a living. But we, the audience, know: surviving and telling the story.