La Maison en Petits Cubes (2008)

The House of small cubes is a 12 minute movie I found while browsing Netflix. The protagonist lives in a house tower on a planet where the sea levels have risen. He has to continue building onto his house to keep safe from flooding. One day he accidentally drops his pipe into one of the lower levels of his home. He buys scuba gear in order to retrieve it. As he continues down to the lower levels, memories come flooding back of the time when each level of his home was the top level. It's sort of a depressing film but at 12 minutes long you can't go wrong.

With most of the town around him flooded and with those waters steadily rising, a solitary old gent has to build on top of his already multi-tiered building to escape the water. Luckily, he is quite adept with bricks and mortar and is soon an extra few feet above the waterline, but when he is looking down through the trapdoor he leaves on the floor for fishing, he loses his pipe. He has others, but none so good as his favourite so he dons a wetsuit and dives down through what becomes an history of his life. Each level of the tower inspires memories of his wife, his family and of the community before the deluge set in. These illustrations of his life and reminiscences are charmingly and simply drawn, allowing more emphasis on a story that is both poignant and occasionally quite amusing, too. For me, the ever encroaching water served quite nicely as a metaphor for the equally relentless march of time. Every time he builds higher, he has to build smaller and as we see the effects that has had on the building over the years, we appreciate that he is having to start again more often. It won’t be long now before he runs out of room or time and as we watch him endure the loneliness his day to day existence offers, perhaps that’s a blessing?