The Clouds of Odessa (2026)
There is a lovely, aching idea at the heart of The Clouds of Odessa, and it is almost enough to carry the film on its own. Luca Arcangeli's thirteen-minute animated short follows a Ukrainian film-maker dreaming of a love story she longs to put on screen but fears she may never be able to make, and the concept moved me more than the execution quite managed to. A good film with a great idea inside it, held back by its own form. Three stars.
The premise is quietly devastating, and carries an irony the film seems only half aware of. Here is a director mourning a film she cannot make, the war and the circumstances around her closing off the possibility, and yet the very act of telling us about that unmade film becomes a film in itself. The thing she longs for and cannot have is conjured into being in front of us, if only as a ghost of itself. That tension, between the picture imagined and the picture permitted, is genuinely poignant, and it is the best thing here by a distance. As a meditation on art made impossible by circumstance, on the films that history and catastrophe quietly erase before they can exist, it has real weight.
The trouble, for me, is the animation. It is fine, but it is basic, and it kept pulling me out of the spell the writing was casting. There is a flatness to it that reminded me of the early Flash animations that washed across YouTube in the internet's first days, and while I suspect some of that roughness is deliberate, a handmade, sketchbook quality to match the film's wistful, unfinished subject, it read to me more as a limitation than a choice. If anything the way it was animated actively worked against it. A film this tender in its ideas wanted images to match, and instead the visuals kept undercutting the emotion rather than deepening it.
So I come out of it in an unusual place: the story behind the film is better than the film itself. The idea of it, the ache of the director and her lost love story, the quiet statement about the art a war swallows, lingered with me far longer than anything I actually watched on screen. That is not nothing, a short that leaves you turning its concept over is doing something right, but I could not shake the sense that the execution was letting the idea down.
Three stars. The Clouds of Odessa is a thoughtful, melancholy and genuinely affecting little film with a premise that deserves to be seen, even if its modest animation keeps it from landing as hard as it might have. Worth watching for the idea alone, and I will remember it, mostly for the film it was dreaming about rather than the one it is.
The Clouds of Odessa screens at the BFI London Film Festival as part of the Life / Drawing animated shorts programme.
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