Many of us know what it is like to be an anonymous individual living our lives in a city that doesn’t make space for us. We arrive in these sprawling urban ecosystems without warning and spend our days working, studying, and loving while attempting to piece together the narrative of our own lives in relative peace. But what happens when someone suddenly decides that’s not okay? That YOU are not okay? That maybe they’ve had enough and you need to leave? Daniel Bruson explores this terrifying shift in his 2024 animated short film Paria, inviting viewers to slowly witness the harrowing collapse of a peaceful existence as a young woman is forced into an agonizing fight for her rightful place in the world.

The young woman at the centre of this turmoil, our protagonist, has done nothing wrong. She simply exists in a space that others have decided she does not deserve to occupy. As the film unfolds through its wordless, visceral language, I began to understand that I was watching not a personal conflict but a parable about the fundamental urge some people have to expel, oppress, and sometimes even annihilate those deemed inconvenient or unworthy of the ground beneath their feet.

The film is a hand-painted, frame-by-frame animation that Bruson has developed through years of patient experimentation. This craft gives Paria a convoluted texture and constant movement that unsettled me, as if we were watching something desperate to counterattack. As the director explains, each frame is drawn digitally, then printed and painted by hand with ink, watercolour, and acrylic. This process allows the brushstroke itself to convey a visceral atmosphere in a way that digital precision could never replicate. The intricate methodology unleashes its terrifying power during the chaotic crowd sequences, where individual bodies dissolve entirely into a labyrinth of fleeting shapes and terrifying ink blots, attempting to swallow the vulnerable protagonist into a monstrous collective sea of hostility.

Latin American animation frequently carries a distinct urgency that feels especially potent in this context, as we have seen in some of the region’s most acclaimed short films. It comes from a tradition that has long understood that the personal and the political are inseparable, and that the stories of individuals are always entangled with the larger forces of history and power that shape our lives. This is a film that does not look away from the ugly, channelling this sensibility with a craftsman’s patience and an artist’s eye for devastating detail. 

The older people in the crowd are consumed by a rage that has curdled into something monstrous, turning their bodies into weapons against those who are not even the true culprits of their suffering. The film forces us to ask the uncomfortable question of why we so often choose to punish the weak rather than confront the powerful. It is the logic of the oppressor: a man who forces the young woman to fight for her life not from a position of strength, but from a deep, abiding fear of receiving the pain he inflicts. It is a desperate attempt to maintain his privilege by crushing those he perceives as more vulnerable, and in this dynamic, Bruson captures something essential about the psychology of violence.

Yet within this brutal landscape, the film finds its fragile hope in the connection between the young woman and a little girl. Their bond, transcending the chaos around them, suggests that the innocence of youth might still hold the key to something better, if only we can learn to protect rather than destroy. The expression on the little girl’s face, smiling amidst the chaos, is what has stayed with me most, lingering in my mind long after the film ended.

There are moments in Paria when the terror subsides, when the sound design and the beauty of the composition offer a respite from the despair, a sense that even in the most hopeless circumstances, there is still something worth fighting for. The fear that pervades the film is not limited to the victim but extends to the perpetrator as well: a reminder that violence is a cycle that consumes everything it touches, and that the only way to break it is to recognise the humanity in those we have been taught to see as different.

The absence of dialogue in Paria feels to me like a profound statement about the nature of the conflicts it depicts, a recognition that when tension reaches a certain pitch, verbal communication becomes impossible and the only language left is that of bodies in motion, the terrible friction of flesh against flesh. This choice forces us as viewers to read the film with our eyes and our senses, making the young girl’s desperation feel immediate in a way that exposition alone could hardly achieve.

And so we are ultimately left to ponder whether the beauty we create and the love we fiercely protect can provide enough shelter to save this fractured world from ourselves. The answer cannot be given, because it is a question that each of us must answer in our own way, in our own small corners of the world. Perhaps that is the only hope the film can offer. We are here, we are now, and despite everything, we continue to exist, to occupy our spaces, to protect our ground, and to reach out to one another across the divides that some have tried to place between us. Perhaps our sheer determination to exist and reach out to one another remains the only possibility of redemption available to us in the dark.