God Is Shy

Filmstill God Is Shy

God Is Shy

Dieu est timide
Jocelyn Charles
International Competition Animated Film 2025
Animated Film
France
2025
15 minutes
French
Subtitles: 
English

The train ride is deadly boring. The landscape rushes past as a buzzing surrealist kaleidoscope of colours and Ariel and Paul pass the time by drawing their worst nightmares for each other. For Paul it is his mother swimming towards him on the open sea to drag him underwater, for Ariel it is the confrontation with a psychotic woman in the bathtub. What starts out as a game turns uncanny when fellow traveller Gilda joins them – and begins to tell them that the eeriest thing ever happened to her. She hypnotised her demented husband in his sleep. The one who answered her had been none other than God. An indignant God, a disgruntled God and finally a downright angry God, for she had absolutely refused to stop asking her sleeping husband: “Why do we exist?”
With an incredibly precise sense for the moment when the profane suddenly develops the potential for horror, Jocelyn Charles takes us on a magnificent psycho-trip. The director leaves it to the audience to determine whether to watch the 2D animation as spot-on genre entertainment or whether to take in the undertones: the hubris of humans who constantly play God and want to solve every mystery, for example. A hubris that does not remain without consequences.

Marie Ketzscher

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Jocelyn Charles
Script
Jocelyn Charles
Producer
Joséphine Mancini
Animation
Tamerlan Bekmurzayev, Jocelyn Charles, Hugues Valin
World Sales
Anaïs Colpin
Nominated for: mephisto 97.6 Audience Award