I like to watch the “Criterion Closet Picks” videos on YouTube. If you’ve never seen them: people from the film world, be they directors, actors or whatever, get invited into the Criterion closet, which is a closet full of DVDs and Blu-rays, and they get to pick and choose films they like. As long as they talk about them for a bit as well.

So I just finished watching the one where director Gints Zilbalodis from Latvia picks a number of films. Normally I may make a few notes with regards to the films that get chosen, but this time, it was the director himself who seemed such a great guy that I became curious about his films. The write-up said he had just made ‘Flow’ so off I went to the IMDb website.

Turns out Flow is an animated film, in a style which seems highly original, judging by the trailer. I’m not much of a fan of animated films, to be honest, but this one seems an absolute gem, about a cat (it helps if you’re a cat lover I suppose!) who has to survive in a drowned out world without human beings. Amazingly, there’s no dialogue and all the animals have real-life “voices”, which involved trips to the zoo to get recordings of some rarer species! It’s an almost biblical theme, but then without humans.

Premiering at Cannes earlier this year and winning awards in Annecy, it has since been submitted by Latvia for the Best International Feature Film category of the 2025 Academy Awards. The IMDb score of 7.9 underwrites the quality of this film.

It is out this month (December 2024), so definitely one to seek out. It’s a u-rated film, so why not try and make it a Christmas outing with the whole family!

Adrian