Hothouse
Best short, Meridian Animation Salon 2026. Official selection, Nocturne Shorts Week 2026.
The programmer's note
Six minutes, four thousand paintings, no story, and it works. What we would point at is the timing. Abergel-Kaplan animates the leaves on threes and the light on the glass on ones, so half the frame is breathing and half is alive, and that mismatch is why it feels like a room instead of a picture. Watch the north wall. The sound is all real, recorded in the building, and it is the reason the film does not float away.
The film
Abergel-Kaplan spent a winter drawing in the palm house of a municipal botanical garden in Montreal, where the temperature is held at twenty-four degrees and the glass runs with condensation while the city outside sits at minus eighteen. Hothouse is the result: roughly four thousand gouache paintings on paper, photographed under glass, running six minutes. There is no character and no dialogue. The film follows heat. It moves the way warm air moves, up through the leaves, across the glass, down the cold north wall, and the animation is timed to a breathing rate rather than to a beat. Colour does the narrative work: the greens hold constant while the light beyond the glass runs a whole day in six minutes. Mateo Ilagan built the sound from recordings made inside the actual building, mostly the ventilation and the irrigation coming on and off its timer.
