AWN Exclusive: Torill Kove’s ‘Maybe Elephants’ Trailer

The new animated short from the Oscar-winning ‘The Danish Poet’ director gets its world premiere June 11 at Annecy 2024 in the official short film competition; the film explores the many ripples flowing from a mother’s restlessness and its impact on her family.

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Torill Kove’s newest short, Maybe Elephants, gets its world premiere June 11 as part of the Official Competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, which runs June 9-15. The 2D animated short narrates Kove’s formative teenage years growing up in a loving family that must suddenly navigate the strong pull of individual needs. It explores the many ripples flowing from a mother’s restlessness and how this impacts her family.

Maybe Elephants follows “three rebellious teenage daughters, a restless mother, a father struggling with potatoes, and maybe some elephants.” The family swaps a safe and predictable life in Norway with the fresh unknowns of vibrant 1970s Nairobi, Kenya. What could possibly go wrong?

AWN is excited to share an exclusive Maybe Elephants first-look trailer:

Kove, a Norwegian-born filmmaker and animator living in Canada, has received Oscar nominations for three of her films, including My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts and Me and My Moulton, scoring an Oscar win for the third, The Danish Poet in 2007.

“I see this film as a sequel to my 2015 short Me and My Moulton, which was a semi-biographical snapshot of my family in the 1960s, when my sisters and I were under 10 years old, and my parents were young and hip,” said Kove. “In Maybe Elephants, I’m revisiting the same family. I think everybody has at least one important story. It can be catastrophic, like a war, or romantic. Maybe Elephants is my story, and it goes like this: we were a happy family, and then our parents left us.”

Maybe Elephants is a co-production by Mikrofilm AS (Lise Fearnley, Tonje Skar Reiersen) and the National Film Board of Canada (Maral Mohammadian).