Award-Winning NFB Animated Short ‘Boat People’ Coming to POV Shorts

Thao Lam and Kjell Boersma’s award-winning new National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animated short Boat People will be featured in season seven of POV Shorts — a collection of ‘the best and boldest independent short films’ streaming free of charge on POV.org and on the PBS App. The latest POV Shorts selection will air on PBS affiliate stations across the U.S. (check local listings).

Canadians can also continue to stream Boat People on the NFB’s free online screening platform, nfb.ca.

Synopsis: As a little girl in Vietnam, Thao’s mother would rescue ants from bowls of sugar water. The tiny creatures would later return the favor, leading her desperate family through darkness — and pointing the way to safety.

With Boat People, illustrator and author Thao Lam undertakes a creative rescue mission of her own, joining forces with animator Kjell Boersma to recount the experiences of her family, who were among over 1.6 million refugees who fled the chaotic aftermath of the Vietnam War, venturing across the South China Sea in precarious open boats.

The 10-minute short employs a hybrid of traditional 2D animation, stop-motion multiplane, and 3D rendering to capture the unique aesthetic of Lam’s handmade paper textures and patterns. Lam is a critically acclaimed Vietnamese-Canadian children’s book author and illustrator who arrived in Canada with her parents at the age of three as a refugee from Vietnam; her books include the multi-award winning Wallpaper (2018) and Paper Boat (2020).

Lam’s co-helmer, Boersma is a writer, director and animator whose projects combine traditional and digital animation techniques in novel ways. He directed the short film Monster Slayer (2015) and was commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and TIFF Kids to write and direct DAM! The Story of Kit the Beaver (2017).

Boat People has been selected by more than 30 festivals around the world, including the Ottawa International Animation Festival, DOC NYC, the Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film and the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival.

The film has garnered 10 awards and mentions to date, including the Milos Stehlik Global Impact Award at the Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, a Special Mention at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival in Germany, and the Audience Award and Helen Hill Award for Animated Short at the New Orleans Film Festival, a short-films qualifying festival for the 97th Academy Awards.

The film is produced by Justine Pimlott and Jelena Popović for the NFB.