Annecy Review: 58th tackles its tragic true story with supreme artfulness and care

One of the great animated movies of the past decade is Carl Joseph E. Papa's The Missing, a stunning work that tackles childhood sexual abuse with utmost sensitivity, care, and creativity. It's a movie that shook me to my core, left me weeping, and one that I think about often. So when I heard that Papa had a new movie premiering this year, it skyrocketed to the top of my list. 

58th premiered at Rotterdam earlier this year and has now played at Annecy, with more festival appearances in its near future. It's another major work from one of our most exciting animation filmmakers, and another one that takes on heavy subject matter. Papa's work is such a great example of how animation can be used to tell any story, and is maybe even particularly well-suited to depicting the horrors of the world. Like The Missing, 58th employs rotoscope animation, which I'm always drawn to. It allows a certain immediacy of emotion to come through the screen, but as I was watching/crying through 58th, it occurred to me how this approach to animation also grants dignity to its subject matter. It lets us see the expressions on the characters' faces, read the intensity of feeling, while also giving this one step of removal, a bit of space for them to breathe in. It's intimate without being invasive. So it's a perfect approach to this story.

58th is a work of non-fiction that is part documentary, but also something more. It uses news reports and stock footage, but also frequently tells its story in more narrative forms. The film is framed by a Zoom conversation between Maria Reynafe Castillo (portrayed magnificently by Glaiza de Castro) and a filmmaker (played by Mikoy Morales). Reynafe relays her personal story of the Maguindanao massacre that occurred in 2009. The wife of a provincial vice mayor was traveling with some companions and a large group of journalists to file her husband's paperwork to run for the governorship when their vehicles were stopped by a group of 100 armed men, hired by a political rival. All 58 people traveling were brutally murdered, many of their bodies mutilated before being buried in a massive pit along with their crushed vehicles. It's the largest killing of journalists in modern history.

Reynafe and her family carry additional pain because her father, Reynaldo "Bebot" Momay (portrayed in the film by the late Ricky Davao) was one of the journalists killed, and the only victim whose body was never found. To this day, her family has not received a death certificate, nor have they received justice. Because there's no body, there's no evidence, and thus the court case did not include Bebot. It's been a source of trauma, anger, and pain for the family for almost twenty years now.

It's an intense and tragic story, one that often had me weeping. De Castro does a brilliant, beautiful job of capturing Reynafe's complex emotions. Obviously, she experiences outrage and sorrow, but she's also a pillar of strength for her family, resolute in her search for justice, even in the face of so many societal shortcomings. There are so many wrinkles to the story that are outrageous, infuriating. While recovering the victims bodies, the authorities used a backhoe to dig up the pit, the weight of the machinery damaging evidence along with, you know, the massive claw violently tearing through the dirt. I'll forever be haunted by a particular line: "They stopped digging at 57. 57." Reynafe being the person left behind, the one forced to carry that burden, seeking answers and justice where she's so unlikely to find any. It's the kind of personal true story that will always move me, make me weep, light me on fire with righteous indignity. It reminded me of the flurry of emotions I felt while watching I'm Still Here.

If this story were being presented in a straightforward documentary style, it would be impactful, powerful, emotional. But the way Papa has crafted his telling adds so much to the story, and makes 58th not just a recounting of a tragedy, but a tremendously touching memorial for Bebot, and an ode to Reynafe's strength. The film doesn't shy away from the violence. Indeed, one of the most striking sequences recreates the massacre itself in stark black and white with violent splashes of red bloodshed; it's as haunting a scene as I've seen this year. But the film also takes time to remember and celebrate moments of happiness, whether it's through family photos or a memory like lighting fireworks for New Year's (maybe my favorite scene in the entire movie). The film seems to say: acts of violence can rip our loved ones away from us, but they can never take away what those people meant, or the time we spent together. Those memories live on, and as long as we're here to tell their stories, they're here, too.

The way we move into some of these scenes is also really cool. We often return to the Zoom call, where we check in with the conversation between Reynafe and the filmmaker. He'll ask questions, she'll give answers, and then all of a sudden, she'll say something like "Come with me." Suddenly, a bit of time travel occurs, whether the characters are transported within their little squares on the call, or one of them crosses that little line in the middle to suddenly inhabit the same space. It blurs the line between the current remembering and the memory itself, a fluid flow of past and present. It's an artful way to show how we are made of memory, and we often live there.

I've already touched on the film's animation, how it both gives dignity to its subjects while also allowing us generous access to the story's emotional core. But it's also worth mentioning how gorgeous it is. The film's rotoscope doesn't settle into just one style. Sometimes, the characters' faces are full of angles and strong lines, while other times there's a softer and more painterly approach. Sometimes, our "time travelers" are more in focus than their surroundings, helping to orient us in time and space. The rotoscoping of family photos and objects is a great touch, too, and weirdly almost makes even the actual live-action footage (pulled from news reports and such) to slot more neatly into the larger aesthetic of the film, since the grain of that footage makes it sort of slot in/rhyme with the animation.

A film that is documenting tragedy can often feel like a eulogy, a sad reminder of what was lost. 58th certainly has that in its DNA -- it honors the victims of this massacre with thoughtfulness and care. But it's also so much more than that, a celebration of one of the lives that was lost, a portrait of strength in Reynafe's continued quest for justice, and more. It's a bold take on non-fiction storytelling, one that uses animation to enhance, expand, and experiment with the form in powerful ways. 58th is a must-see, and one of the year's finest animated movies.