Olivia & The Clouds

The Dominican Republic’s third ever animated feature film is a mesmerising, Rashomon-like exploration of love and loss.

Olivia is struggling to get over Ramón. Reminiscing over good times and bad, she encounters a literal ghost from the past under her bed. Ramón, meanwhile, is reminded of the intimacy they shared as he faces off with an anthropomorphic, very clingy pot plant. As Olivia deals with heartbreak, her son Mauricio and his partner Barbara confront a crisis point in their own relationship: one yearns for commitment; while the other, racked by cold feet, wishes to simply disappear.

After a prolific career making shorts and music videos, Tomás Pichardo Espaillat makes his feature debut with this mixed-media masterpiece depicting the fragmented nature of memory and the intensity of falling in and out of love. Made over a 10-year period and receiving awards and special mentions at Locarno, London, Málaga and beyond, the film is a striking kaleidoscope of visual techniques – stop-motion, claymation, rotoscoping, graphic sketching, papier-mâché and cut-outs – set against a soundscape evoking the bustle of Santo Domingo, where the story is set. Building on what the director terms the “emotional illiteracy” dramatised in Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage, Olivia & the Clouds plays with storytelling and subjectivity to portray how recollection often involves distortion, and how romance can both consume and corrode lonely souls.

“Tomás Pichardo Espaillat’s feature debut is one of endless creativity and wildly thoughtful animation … The infinite experimentation and transfixing variety form into a memorable tapestry of cohesion and beauty.” – Loud and Clear