16/07/2025 - Rebecca Blöcher’s short film animates a mother-daughter bond too fragile to hold

“I thought: a mother can come to her children at any time, and my children can come to me at any time”, Rebecca Blöcher was told by her mother. But with over a decade spent living in a car, there was no suitable place for such moments. Her desire for “something more” meant leaving behind a home and the chance for a real bond with her child.

Having been able to sit down and truly talk with her mother only a year before her death, the German filmmaker taps into the language of animation to at least try to understand her unconventional mother. Mama Micra (2024) visualises tape-recorded conversations between the two, following the mother’s memories of untamed life. After receiving a Special Mention at IDFA in Amsterdam this past year, the stop-motion film was presented as part of the Short Animated Documentary block at the Slovakian Fest Anča, touching the audience’s hearts.

“My mother lived in her small car for over ten years until she could no longer walk, and the car gave up right after that”, Blöcher says. Through recordings, photographs and imagined scenes, we are led through a life as thrilling as it is incomprehensible to many, both to friends who didn’t understand her, and to her daughter, for whom it was less an excitingly wild life than a bond strained by unspoken issues.

While the journey through this extraordinary life takes place largely on the level of audio, Blöcher and her co-director Frédéric Schuld decided to amplify the story with expressive images. Private photographs blend with animated sequences, and abstract memories with symbols. Like when the mother wanted to visit but felt dismissed, and the daughter appears as a raven perched atop a mountain – one that the mother tries, and fails, to climb in her car. The raven costume appears early on, as Blöcher explains: “My mother asked me why I was wearing this costume and [said] that I look like a raven in it. Since this really happened this way, she basically decided it”.

The emotional distance of the raven figure that often appears set apart from the mother visually underscores the emotional gap imposed by her mother’s lifestyle. She is both observer and participant – watching and reflecting, yet never fully present in her mother’s nomadic world. But the bird’s symbolic resonance echoes the daughter’s quest to understand her mother’s unconventional path.

Such a challenge has been undertaken by many in recent years, with stories rooted in parent-child relationships filtered through memory. Like Charlotte Wells’ feature Aftersun (2023) or Myrid Carten’s debut feature documentary A Want in Her (2024), Mama Micra is part of a wave of films exploring memory, loss and parental connection. Where Wells uses realism and fragmented recollection, and Carten opts for a raw, literal immersion, Blöcher leans into metaphor and tenderness. As all these relationships rely on memory, absence and longing, each daughter takes control of the story not by judging but by trying to understand. As such, and as a deeply personal film, Mama Micra may resonate differently depending on one’s own experiences of family and memory.

But to deal with perception, Blöcher reimagines her mother’s life through mythic animation that many should appreciate – an eyecatcher of a unique and nostalgic charm that only a puppet stop-motion could evoke. The film uses its fuzzy, woollen characters and felt Nissan Micra interior to evoke warmth and memory, as well as loss. The hand-touched surfaces make the emotion feel lived-in. It’s rather hard to pinpoint what makes it all so poignant – be it the warm yet powerful visual language, or the dialogues revealing the sadness of a fragile mother-daughter relationship. The answer is, probably, both.

In the end, Mama Micra is not just a portrait of a woman who chooses “something more”. It’s a daughter’s quiet attempt to rebuild a connection from the fragments left behind. Through felt and fabric and recorded voices, Rebecca Blöcher doesn’t seek to explain her mother’s choices as much as to sit with them; to hold space for a kind of love that never quite found its shape. What we get to experience is an elegy stitched with empathy – unresolved, and utterly human. In a car that could go no further, a thread of mutual understanding appears. And through this film, it keeps driving on.