Brother Directed by Joanna Rudnick 2022, 14 minutes and 21 seconds

Note: We are including this link to the 14-minute documentary film Brother because we think that the combination of film and review together is particularly meaningful: youtube.com.

After watching the short PBS documentary film Brother by filmmaker Joanna Rudnick, I became intrigued by the art of animation, a topic I had never before contemplated. This beautiful documentary, concise, multilayered and expansive, immediately called attention to the form itself and raised a number of questions for me about the function of this medium. In fact I could have used the same words the character of Joanna uses in the film: “I have a million questions!”

I was curious, for instance, about the way animation allows an ongoing tension to exist between the symbolic and the real and between the subjective and objective. I wondered about a suspension or barrier being created so that emotionally charged, difficult content becomes more possible to metabolize. Yet it also seemed that animated imagery permitted an intimate immersion within the mind of the character being portrayed. In addition, I became curious about the particular technique used for this film — rotoscope animation — in which actual live footage is traced over in order to create the animated images, more closely melding reality and its representation. The questions seemed endless and ongoing, and I was aware of the pleasure of venturing into an entirely new landscape as well as a certain inherent vulnerability in doing so.

Gradually, it occurred to me that this combination of desire and anxiety about uncharted territory was perhaps reflective of my entering into an experience essential to the film itself. Constructed as a conversation between a sister and her brother, who apparently have been out of contact for years, the film is born out of the sister's intense desire to know and to understand her brother's opioid addiction, which presumably seems baffling

and somewhat incomprehensible to