The animated documentary short Nowhere Line came up in discussion in the week one workshop – it’s watchable on Vimeo and well worth the 15 minutes.

Nowhere Line: Voices from Manus Island from Lukas Schrank on Vimeo.

It reminds me of the Oscar-nominated Israeli film Waltz With Bashir for a couple of reasons. First, the two films share similar animation styles (thick outlines, dark shading, block colours), but more importantly they each combine two genres not normally combined: animation and documentary. Nowhere Line is “narrated” by Manus Island detainees who share their story through interviews, which are then represented on-screen by animation.

The stylised, impressionistic rendering of each scene places the viewer firmly within the scene being described without looking like a recreation or dramatisation in the traditional sense, which can often look inauthentic (even The Thin Blue Line, one of the most remarkable documentaries ever made, suffers from overly staged reenactments).

This kind of genre mash-up and remix is something I hope to explore in my own work throughout my degree.