The animated short Hypersensitive in Official Competition at the Cannes Film Festival!

A National Film Board of Canada production

Hypersensitive recounts the turbulent, surrealistic journey of a young woman struggling to understand her unique take on the world. Drawing on her own childhood memories as well as her fertile imagination, filmmaker Martine Frossard paints a compassionate portrait of a woman on a quest for healing in a society with little tolerance for difference. Rich in symbolism inspired by plant life, her film is a heartfelt plea for us all to take greater heed of our emotions, even the most painful ones—reminding us that to be sensitive is to be alive.

Hypersensitive recounts the turbulent, surrealistic journey of a young woman struggling to rebuild her self, in defiance of social norms that tell us to repress our emotions.

In my work as an artist, illustrator and animator, I’ve always gravitated towards the same themes. The quest for identity. The realm of perception. Memory. But also grief, traumas, resilience: the way our personality and our ego fragment and then rebuild themselves as we navigate ordeals and different phases of our lives.

I became an orphan at a young age, and I went through the stages of grief: shock, denial, anger and sadness, to finally arrive at resignation and reconstruction.

The idea for this short film was born in the middle of the pandemic when, submerged by our emotions and our repressed shadows, we all felt this desire “for things to get fixed, and FAST.”

With this film I wanted to talk about hypersensitivity and the experience of grief in a society that filters out emotions. All too often, we still tend to interpret heightened sensitivity as some kind of resistance to conformity with social and relationship norms—and yet the majority of us will encounter hypersensitivity, in others or in themselves, at some point in our lives. It comes from what gets imprinted on us in childhood; from our representation of the world, with all its demands. In children, everything enters and everything exits, with no filter. That sensitivity leads to suffering when it comes up against an unstable, uncertain world. In this crisis of sensitivity that our society seems to be going through, our hypersensitivity causes us to intensely feel the absurdity of a world trapped in an impasse of logic and rationality.

The intention behind this short film is to take us back to that innate sensitivity, help us transcend it, and remind ourselves that being sensitive is simply the foundation. We can all take the time to acknowledge the richness of our emotions and welcome the discomfort they can engender.

Martine Frossard

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