Director Tal Kantor On Connecting Intergenerational Trauma with ‘Letter to a Pig’

Hearing someone recount a profound experience can have an unexpected effect on you. A person’s vulnerability and honesty can feel like it’s seeping into your body, making your skin itch and your ears more attuned to the sounds in the room. Tal Kantor’s Letter to a Pig is an overwhelmingly emotional experience for its characters, but then we realize that retelling a trauma can be interpreted and absorbed by a whole new generation of listeners.

Letter is an extremely personal film for Kantor as it was based on an incident she experienced herself. Did other people feel the same way that she did? Were more stories staying with other people in the same way that they stayed with her?

“Letter to a Pig is based on my personal experience as a young schoolgirl,” Kantor says. “[I had] an encounter with a Holocaust survivor who shared his story in my class during Memorial Day, and an unforgettable dream I had afterwards. A lot of imagery from that memory and dream was eventually adapted and made it into the film, but what stayed with me, more than the very visual and vivid images, was the entirety of that experience. That dream was a symptom of how I, as a young girl, absorbed the survivor’s story and how it evolved within me. For that reason, I chose to turn the camera 180 degrees, directing attention not solely towards those recounting the past, but rather on the children silently absorbing these heavy narratives in the classroom, as they represent the future. 

I saw my personal, local experience as an opportunity to examine a more universal and human issue that interested me. The ways trauma can echo from one generation to the next, and the social and personal implications this transmission has on future generations. I wanted to resonate these thoughts on the screen and ask, among other things: Can we learn and talk about past traumas without transmitting them to future generations? 

A class of students listens to a Holocaust survivor speak about how he escaped the clutches of Nazi officers. As the words fly over their heads and they act like typical, bored teens, we notice the survivor’s words resonating with one young woman in the classroom. As the survivor continues to speak, they sink into the floor and take matters into their own hands. Some of these kids don’t even know how easily their emotions have latched onto this man’s words. 

“I sought to explore themes of intergenerational trauma, the transmission of collective memory, and the moral implications of bearing witness to our shared history,” she says. “I directed the class scene to begin with a great distance between the children and the survivor, which slowly gets closer, closed and intense, to the point we feel there is no other option but to run away like children under the table, into the realms of imagination and dreams.

Through the lens of young people hearing about our collective past wounds, I wanted to delve into how these narratives shape our understanding of ourselves, others, and the world around us. It was important for me to highlight the potential in confronting past traumas in a way that evokes empathy, reflection, and a sense of responsibility in younger generations. “

One of my favorite aspects of the film is how it slowly incorporates color into the narrative. Mostly told in black-and-white, we see small pools of pink in the pig but also in moments in the characters’ noses or ears.

“The color appears in key moments in the film, not only in the pig but also in the characters’ face,” Kantor explains. “The pink  of the skin, the blood that flows in our veins. It is used to illustrate the wide spectrum of human emotions between empathy, affection [but also] anger and hatred. As well as highlighting a spectrum of emotions, it is also reactionary, moving from one character to another, the pink crosses over between them and is used to convey this inheritance of narrative.”

There is something unsettled about the animation in terms of how there is something always moving on screen. Sometimes it’s a character’s hair when we look at the back of someone’s head or it’s how they move in the frame. There is something real and alive about it that you can’t put your finger on. It taps into your instinct to keep watching, and it is a based on a technique that Kantor developed. In some moments, we see a realistic eye attached to a drawn body. 

“This film was created using a mixed media technique that I developed, building upon the approach featured in my previous film, In Other Words. The technique involves a fusion of 2D traditional hand-drawn and paint animation on paper, blended with video segments. The process encompasses directing and filming actors, followed by digital manual frame-by-frame drawn animation, and layered with acrylic paint on paper. It’s a long production process involving numerous steps and layers until it organically fuses all the visual elements together to reach this final result.

This technique allows me to visually trace how human memory works – to show how and what we remember. How we focus on certain details that remain realistic and clear in our minds, while others become elusive and tend to change or disappear. Therefore, both the world and the characters in the film appear fragmented and incomplete, so we can sense their inner world and subjective point of view through their visual appearance. 

It might be through a vibrating dark color stain that covers the face with pain and rage, subtle animated lines that express one’s shame or a desire to disappear, or realistic eyes whose penetrating gaze is engraved in our minds forever.”

Everyone that I have discussed the shorts with has had a big reaction to Kantor’s film. Almost all of them, however, mostly want to talk about the ambiguity of the ending and what the pig itself represents. Kantor is working with huge themes and emotions, so dissecting every nuance and frame is exciting as a viewer.

“Different audiences expressed different interpretations to the film’s ending, which mostly captured the heart of the film’s intention,” she says. “As an artist, I value the importance of leaving room for audience interpretation and reflection, particularly when it comes to such multi-layered emotionally charged topics. I do not aspire to offer a definitive solution but rather raise thought provoking questions. It was important to me that the film encourages dialogue, introspection, and the exploration of diverse viewpoints. Above all, in the end, it was important for me that the film will offer a different angle on how we treat our wounds, with the possibility for healing and hope for more compassion.”