Oct 1, 2024

Thrilling Survival Film “Flow” Gets U.S. Trailer and Release Date

In a banner year for animated feature films, Gints Zilvarodis' “Flow,” one of the best films of the year, has received a US release date and a new trailer from US distributors Sideshow and Janus Films.

The new trailer can be seen below:

The film will open in Los Angeles and New York on November 22, followed by a US release on December 6, 2024.

I saw “Flow” last week at the Ottawa International Animated Film Festival. The story is easy to explain. A cat, capybara, lemur, bird, and dog must survive and find dry land on the newly water planet Earth. With the ever-increasing water level, this is a thrilling survival film, and everyone in the audience who watched it with me was spellbound throughout the 85-minute running time, which passed by in a blink of an eye.

It may be easy to describe this film without dialogue, but the emotions and meaning are infinitely more complex. It is an example of cinema at its finest and one of the best animated feature films I have seen in years. A strong contender for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, the film has already been officially submitted by Latvia to the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

The film is the second feature by Latvian director Gints Zilvarodis, who turns 30 this year. He produced his first feature, Away (2019), entirely on his own. Flow, loosely inspired by his 2012 student film Aqua, is a more ambitious $3.7 million French-Belgian co-production, with most of the animation done by Sacre Bleu Productions (France), Take Five (Belgium), and Zilvarodis' own company Dream Well Studios in Latvia.

Zilvarodis serves as director, art director, cinematographer, and editor for the film. In addition, he co-wrote the screenplay with Mat?ss Kaža. He also produced the film with Ron Dyens and Gregory Zalcman.

Leo Siry-Pelissier directed the animation, with music by Zilvarodis with Rihard Zaupe. Sound was by Gruwal Koic-Gallas.

The film was animated with the free open source software Blender and its real-time rendering engine Eevee.