NFB Animated Short ‘Boat People’ Now Available on Vimeo Worldwide

Thao Lam and Kjell Boersma’s multi-award-winning National Film Board of Canada (NFB) animated short Boat People is being featured as a Staff Pick on Vimeo, starting November 19. The film is also available in Canada on nfb.ca and YouTube, and in the U.S. on POV.org and the PBS app.

“We’re proud to feature Kjell Boersma and Thao Lam’s Boat People as a Vimeo Staff Pick,” the platform commented. “The curation team was impressed by how the film employs a deceptively simple, children’s storybook-like animation style to tell an emotionally rich and complex story of war, loss and survival.”

Boat People has been selected by more than 40 festivals around the world, receiving 10 awards to date including the Helen Hill Award for Animated Short at the New Orleans Film Festival, a short films qualifying festival for the 97th Academy Awards.

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.

Boat People 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. The film speaks across time and culture to anyone who’s ever fought to protect their family or community.

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