A Mikrofilm and National Film Board of Canada co-production

In the ’70s, three rebellious teenage daughters, a restless mother, a father struggling with potatoes, and maybe some elephants, find themselves in bustling Nairobi. The family will never be the same.

Created by Oscar®-winning animator Torill Kove (The Danish Poet), Maybe Elephants is a playful and loving autobiographical homage to family, adolescence and the therapeutic power of memories, however unreliable.

Three rebellious teenage daughters, a restless mother, a father struggling with potatoes, and maybe some elephants, find themselves in Nairobi. What could possibly go wrong?

Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Torill Kove narrates the story of her formative teenage years growing up in a loving family who must suddenly navigate the strong pull of individual needs. The parents and three sisters swap a safe and predictable life in Norway with the fresh unknowns of vibrant 1970s Nairobi, Kenya. Featuring the return cast of Me and My Moulton, Maybe Elephants explores the many ripples flowing from a mother’s restlessness, and how this impacts her family.

Bursting with wit, a joyful colour palette and an energetic soundscape, Maybe Elephants is a vivid homage to Kove’s time spent immersed in Nairobi’s bustling culture. The animated short wraps rich nostalgia around memories of eventful family trips, timeless teen antics and those inevitable moments of adolescent epiphany. Reframing a complex upbringing, Maybe Elephants illustrates that within an imperfect memory lies a perfect, if subjective, truth.

What motivated you to make this film?

I see this film as a sequel to my 2015 short Me and My Moulton, which was a semi-biographical snapshot of my family in the 1960s, when my sisters and I were under ten years old and my parents were young and hip. In Maybe Elephants, I’m revisiting the same family.

I think everybody has at least one important story. It can be catastrophic, like a war, or romantic. Maybe Elephants is my story, and it goes like this: we were a happy family and then our parents left us.

Your film addresses the fleeting nature of memory and how our mind can reframe, consciously or not, past events. How much creative liberty did you take in Maybe Elephants with the “real events”? 

I think of it as taking advantage of the gap between reality and memory. In the beginning of the film, the narrator says that she remembers her childhood. But, because the story involves conflicting feelings about her parents, especially her mother, she comes to terms with it by choosing to remember certain events in a way that allows her to love her mother and feel empathy for her.

In that sense, yes, I did take liberties with this story, but I think we do this all the time to help us make sense of our lives.

What motivated you to depict an adolescent experience? How is this specific time of life inspiring to you?

Adolescents like to assert their independence, so it can be a period conflict. In our hometown, we were allowed to do what we wanted as long as we were home by supper, but in Nairobi, we had to navigate an enormous sprawling city where our parents’ freewheeling parenting approach was neither practical nor safe.

In the middle of all this, we were also just teens being teens, making new friends from all over the world, learning to speak English, exploring an exciting city, going dancing, driving around listening to music, skipping school, experiencing falling in love one day and a broken heart the next.

Were you concerned about setting your film in Kenya?

I had some concerns about telling a story based in Kenya because I’m not Kenyan. But at the same time, Maybe Elephants is a story based on a chapter from my family when we lived there, so I also couldn’t just move the location to another country.

Throughout the production, we were in dialogue with Kenyan Canadians in Montreal, and with their help, I think we managed to set a high bar for respectfulness for the film’s location. Our question was always: What would a Kenyan audience think?

Tell us about the production process and how Maybe Elephants was different from your previous films. How did you find the voice-acting process?

It was different this time because we had a relatively short production schedule. There were a few more animators and a bigger art team than usual—there were so many characters and different outfits, and hundreds of backgrounds!

The voice-acting process was a brand-new experience. I usually use my own voice for the narration and dialogue guide track and always hate the sound of my voice. But this time I thought it worked, so we decided to give it a try. I also played the role of the teenage middle sister—way outside my comfort zone, but a lot of fun.

Contact NFB publicist for broadcast-quality excerpts. 

Contact NFB publicist for high-resolution images for print.