Synopsis | 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.

Programmer's note | The film looks at the time that remains in the body after war. In every careful movement of a woman stepping around the cracks in the pavement, one can sense the fear that has never fully left, and the weight of a life that has carried that fear into the present. The body remembers longer and stronger than words do, and that memory appears in the shape of a person’s steps and breath. The film stays with the body’s rhythm as it carries inner wounds and still moves through the day. Rendered in charcoal and gold, the images gently touch the fragments of time left behind in what has been broken. Each crack becomes a line that reveals the pain a person has lived through and the shape of a life they have somehow preserved. In this way, the film finds dignity already present in each step a woman takes. What the film speaks in the end is that life is not about becoming whole, but about living with one’s own light through the golden cracks. In that very life lies the quiet strength of a being that slowly forms itself again along the lines of what has been broken.