A National Film Board of Canada production

A woman walks down the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks in the pavement like a child. Her body remains on high alert, remembering the horrors of a war that continues to haunt her. The Sounds of Things Ablaze is a charcoal-drawn animated short film about the resilience of women.

A woman walks down the sidewalk, avoiding the cracks in the pavement like a child. Her body remains on high alert, remembering the horrors of a war that continues to haunt her.

The Sounds of Things Ablaze transforms a story about human atrocities into a poignant tribute to women who face adversity—one step at a time.

For her debut animated short, which was inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi (in which the cracks in once-broken pottery are highlighted with gold), artist Hayat Najm channels the wounds and imperfections of the past and transmutes them into a poetic work about resilience.

Drawn in charcoal and gold paint, the film features a moving piano score by Jean-Michel Blais.

Told through animated charcoal drawings, this is a story of resilience about a woman still haunted by the horrors of war.

This short film came out of my desire to bring movement to my charcoal drawings. Hearing filmmaker Theodore Ushev’s talk at the 2019 Sommets du cinéma d’animation de Montréal (Montreal Animated Film Summit) helped me confirm how much I wanted to do that—to bring my illustrations to life through animation.

I approached the film’s sequences in the spirit of the Japanese art of kintsugi, which involves repairing broken pottery by gluing pieces together with gold, thereby highlighting the beauty of imperfection. Similarly, my short film reminds us that our wounds and traumas can be sources of beauty and power. We carry the traces of our stories within us. In my case, I left Lebanon at age five, in the middle of a full-blown civil war, to come to Canada with my family.

Throughout the film, objects transform and are then erased; this is what connects the scenes and creates the rhythm of the film as well. The contrast between gentleness and violence is a way for me to show images that are violent and that resonate with meaning, but that viewers will “accept” because of the gentle metamorphoses of animation—a world that is transformed and intuitive yet transcends reality.

The Sounds of Things Ablaze is autofiction, inspired by my own lived experience and that of so many other women. Made up of non-chronological, symbolic narrative images, the film seeks to make us feel emotions rather than representing them literally, in much the same way that poetry does. I decided to make the film without words. Instead, music acts as the narrative voice and provides the overall atmosphere.

I’ve always loved piano, and the first time I saw Jean-Michel Blais play, at the Montreal Jazz Festival, I knew I had found my pianist. To my great delight, Jean-Michel agreed to be part of the project, bringing sound to the images with his sensitive musical composition.

The images for this film were created entirely on paper. It was important for me to have the freedom that comes with the immediacy of this process, without the distraction of a screen. I wanted to go back to the roots of what traditional animation offers: a direct connection with the medium.

With this short film, I hope to sublimate the horror of war so that it becomes more bearable, while telling the story from a woman’s point of view. The Sounds of Things Ablaze is intimate and personal, but also universal. It reflects the experience of every woman who carries wounds within her and continues to move forward despite the battles she has to fight—whether those battles are internal or external.

Hayat Najm

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