ShortList 2023: How Jonathan Laskar Confronted Family Trauma in His Animated Debut ‘The Record’

“The Record” was selected as a finalist in this year’s ShortList Film Festival, presented by TheWrap. You can watch the films and vote for your favorite here.

A mysterious man enters an antique musical instrument shop and hands the owner a vinyl record. The shopkeeper puts it on the turntable and out pour the sounds of Peruvian flutes. The man then picks up the needle and drops it down in the same place. This time, Ikembe melodies flow. The visitor lifts and drops the needle again and again, and each time the disc plays different music. “Yes,” he tells the stunned owner. “It’s a magic record. It reads your soul. It plays everything you’ve forgotten.”

So begins “The Record,” Jonathan Laskar’s 2D animated short that has picked up more than a dozen prizes on the festival circuit (including the Annecy animation fest) and is a finalist in TheWrap’s ShortList Film Festival 2023. Over eight and a half hypnotic minutes, the record turns around and around as the shop owner travels through the time machine of his memories. Here he is as a young boy alone on a train, frightened of a German guard checking identities. Here is a star of David being sewn onto a piece of clothing. It all unfolds in beautiful, high-contrast black and white, shadows sometimes ebbing and flowing to the rhythm of the pops and clicks of the vinyl.

“The basic idea behind the magic vinyl came from reading a famous [Jorge Luis] Borges short story, ‘The Book of Sand,’ and the infinite book,” Laskar said during a recent Zoom call from his home in Geneva. “It was the idea of making infinite music.”

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Laskar began drawing and writing “The Record,” his first film, during the Covid lockdown of 2020. Initially, he planned on using existing music as the soundtrack to the shopkeeper’s journey. But when he had trouble securing permission to certain tracks, he talked to his producer, Sophie Laskar-Haller, and decided to compose the music himself. He then began a trip of his own back in time, to around 2000, when he left his native France to study architecture in Weimar, Germany, and, from the apartment he was living in at the time, he could see the Buchenwald concentration camp memorial. “I was violently confronted with history,” he said. “At the time, I was making a lot of music. I started playing klezmer music. I learned Yiddish, which wasn’t our family’s language because we are Sephardic.”

Revisiting these memories, he said, inspired him to compose a mosaic of music that reflected his family’s history as Sephardic Jews who originated from North Africa and came to Europe before the second World War. The sounds range from traditional Jewish music, to lutes and Maghreb flutes, to classical Western piano. “In the end, the music was very personal, much closer to the story I wanted to tell,” Laskar said.

And that story was based on that of his grandfather, who was separated from his mother at the Swiss border in 1939 and survived five years imprisonment in Nazi Germany. “There’s a family and historical background, even if it’s not [strictly] autobiographical,” said Laskar, who brought in Swiss animator Sébastien Godard to help with some of the visuals in the shop sequences. “The fact that the main character is cut off from his cultural identity is very personal for me. My family is religious. But I was cut off from religion as a child because I wasn’t brought up in religion, unlike the rest of my family.”

The majority of “The Record” is in black and white, with blocks of parallel lines in various forms working as a leitmotif that recalls prison bars and the idea of confinement. But as the shop owner listens to the magic disc and grapples with the train encounter and records everything on a series of analogue cassette tapes, he eventually accesses his earliest memories of being with his mother — and these memories are in color.

Ominous-looking trees in black and white morph into more lush vegetation in soft earth tones surrounding a young boy and a woman playing the lute. And unlike the pronounced cuts that punctuate the scenes in the shop, here, the images unfold more fluidly. “By living through this trauma, he lost his perception of color,” Laskar said. “It’s only by overcoming this memory that he’s able to perceive reality and his environment in color again.”

The 2023 ShortList Film Festival runs online from June 28 – July 12, honoring the top award-winning short films that have premiered at major festivals in the past year. Watch the finalists and vote for your favorite here.

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